Solar Sail News and Upcoming JPL Missions

abkaiser writes "I had the opportunity to interview a supervisor at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The JPL is putting together several missions utilizing solar sail technology. The interview and article detail where NASA and the JPL are in using solar sails for applications and research.You can read the article or skip ahead to the cool pictures of prototype and proposed solar sails. The article addresses NASA's JPL solar sail missions, but not other commercial or private projects like Cosmos 1."

I remember this idea from years ago

[Macka]

At the tender age of 12 (some 29 years ago) I submitted a drawing of a space ship powered by sails as part of a school homework assignment. I got the idea after visiting a friends house and seeing a strange ornament displayed in their window. It was a glass dome and inside were 4 paddles mounted cross wise (horizontally) on a vertical support. One side of each paddle was black and the other white (or silver, its hard to remember now). On a nice sunny day the paddles would start to spin. I was so enchanted by this I never forgot it, and dreamed about flying through space on solar sales for years after. I never guessed that one day I might actually get to see it in action.

Reminds

[Belseth]

Always reminds me of the short story Sunjammer. It brings to mind the massive racing yachts. Ever since I read the story in my teens the slow motion image of the ships colliding has stuck in my mind. I'd love to see a solar sail race. The scale alone would be epic.

Nonphysical Solar Sails Dismissed?

[kurtu5]

Neil Murphy Dismisses the notion on a nonphyiscal solar sair right off hand. "We use aluminized plastics and nanotubes. You really do have to have a physical sail. Magnetic fields interact, but not in the same way." What about Robert?

Magnetic sails proposed by Robert Zubrin [nasa.gov] can be seen in the middle of this NASA page. So is it or is it not feasible?

Perhaps Mr Murphy has time invested in physical sail research...

Me? I just wanna be a fry cook on Venus.

Re:Nonphysical Solar Sails Dismissed?

[kurtu5]

Oops, it was actually Winglee who suggests injecting plasma into a more modest magnetic field in response to the critique of Zubrin's ten kilometer coil.

"What we're proposing to do is create a magnetic bubble to deflect the solar wind," Winglee explained

Is this feasible? Its 5 something, time to go home.

interesting physics

[bcrowell]

One interesting thing about the physics of solar sails is that, counterintuitively, the worst possible thing to do with one is turn it perpendicular to the sun's rays. You actually get the maximum rate of transfer of kinetic energy if the sail is at 55 degrees to the rays, rather than 90 (explanation here [lightandmatter.com], p. 149). There are also some pretty counterintuitive physical results about ordinary water sailing, e.g., that it's possible for some racing sailboats to complete a closed-loop course at an average speed greater than the speed of the wind!

Re:Cosmos 1

[Paua Fritter]

Does the US or Europe offer a comparable "cheap" road to the sky?

The US military has also converted some of its old ICBMs into peaceful launch vehicles [spacetoday.org]. I guess they are competing with NASA, because there's some regulation that these facilities can only be offered to US government or government-sponsored agencies.

Get used to it folks! What with the US anti-missile shield, in a couple of decades time there'll be thousands more missiles entering the second-hand market from such places as Russia, China, India, and North Korea.