NASA WILL LAUNCH A NEW MISSION ON TUESDAY TO TEST ITS SOLAR SAIL PROPULSION SYSTEM
On April 23rd, which is just 6 days away, something I dreamed about in my childhood will become a reality. I first read about the concept of a solar sail as a kid in the 1980’s, though the idea wasn’t new. It’s essentially what it sounds like: a sail that captures sunlight to create movement. And now this amazing technological concept is about to be tested by NASA for the first time. Its name is the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (or ACS3), and is set to launch this coming Tuesday on the Rocket Lab’s Electron Rocket from New Zealand.
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THE “CUBESAT” WILL UNFURL IT’S LARGE SAIL AFTER LAUNCH ON ROCKET LAB’S ELECTRON ROCKET
If you don’t find this exciting you haven’t paid attention to any classic sci-fi to know how big this is. It’s the first time that any human mission to space will use composite booms in orbit (and then to get out of orbit). These booms are the key, as they are what will hopefully make it possible to deploy the solar sail. The actual vehicle isn’t all that large, and the “cubesat” will attempt to unfurl the solar sail about 600 miles above us, or twice as far up (and away) as the International Space Station. The cubesat is only the size of a microwave, yet the sails once unfurled will be 30 feet square.
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UNFURLING THE SOLAR SAIL SHOULD ONLY TAKE 25 MINUTES, AND THEN A NEW ADVENTURE BEGINS
The unfurling should only take about 25 minutes, and NASA has of course included a host of cameras to capture images of the process, as well as to confirm the shape and alignment of the solar sail. The first phase of the mission (solar sail successfully unfurled, of course) will take about 2 months as NASA tests maneuvers in orbit to get data on the power of the sun as a propulsion force. Hopefully, NASA’s solar sail mission will do better than the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2, which launched in June, 2019 only to end all to soon in November, 2022, when it burned to a crisp falling back to Earth.
In theory, we could make space probes or even vehicles that can travel using nothing but the sun’s energy. If we build them well enough, they could last indefinitely.
