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posted by chromas on Thursday June 20 2019, @11:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the hunting-fruit-pastries dept.

One Legacy of Carl Sagan may Take Flight Next Week-A Working Solar Sail:

As early as next Monday night, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch a cluster of 24 satellites for the US Air Force. Known as the Space Test Program-2 mission, the rocket will deposit its payloads into three different orbits. Perhaps the most intriguing satellite will be dropped off at the second stop—a circular orbit 720km above the Earth's surface. This is the Planetary Society's LightSail 2 spacecraft.

After a week in space, allowing the satellites deposited in this orbit to drift apart, LightSail 2 will eject from its carrying case into open space. About the size of a loaf of bread, the 5-kg satellite will eventually unfurl into a solar sail 4 meters long by 5.6 meters tall. The Mylar material composing the sail is just 4.5 microns thick, or about one-tenth as thick as a human hair.

This experiment, which will attempt to harness the momentum of photons and "sail" through space, is the culmination of decades of work by The Planetary Society. "This goes back to the very beginning, to Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray and Lou Friedman," the organization's chief executive, Bill Nye, told Ars in an interview. "We are carrying on a legacy that has been with us since the founders. It's just an intriguing technology because it lowers the cost of going all over the place in the Solar System."

There were two prior attempts by the Planetary Society at deploying light sails. In 2005, the first stage of the rocket launching Cosmos 1 failed. In 2015, LightSail 1 was able to achieve orbit but experienced several technical difficulties from which lessons were learned and used to inform the design of this upcoming attempt with LightSail 2.

More details about the process can be found at the Planetary Society.


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  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday June 21 2019, @03:05PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Friday June 21 2019, @03:05PM (#858563) Journal

    OK. More research...

    From The Planetary Society [planetary.org]

    The idea of solar sailing dates back to the 1600s, but the story of LightSail begins in the late 1970s, when NASA considered flying a giant solar sail to Halley's comet, and Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan promoted the concept during an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The project was ultimately cancelled.

    Or you could just go to TFA.

    As he popularized space and science in the 1970s on television talk shows and in books, Sagan sometimes espoused the virtues of solar sailing. Theoretically, the continual acceleration of photons, although much more gradual than chemical propulsion, could push spacecraft to other stars because this acceleration is continual. Originally, he'd hoped to launch a solar sail to catch up to Halley's Comet in 1986, but that never happened.

    After Sagan co-founded The Planetary Society in 1980 to advocate for government support for space exploration, he and others continued to push the technology. But because the US government was focused on more traditional modes of exploration—the space shuttle program and chemical-powered probes to the outer Solar System—the Planetary Society eventually took up the cause on its own.

    The Planetary Society even prove it with the Interview on Youtube. [youtube.com]

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