Solar Sailing
The award for the coolest scientific breakthrough that I had never heard about goes to the brainiacs behind the Cosmos 1 - the first solar-sail powered spacecraft. Sponsored by the Planetary Society, a non-profit space advocacy group, the Cosmos 1 is set to launch on a Russian missile as soon as tomorrow.Using eight specially designed triangular sails, the Cosmos 1 hopes to harness the power generated from light photons from the sun bouncing off the sails to propel the craft out of the Earth's gravitational field without even a drop of fuel. Although the power from the photons will initially be minimal, it is believed that they will accumulate over time, increasing the speed at which the Cosmos 1 travels by 100 mph a day.
Although the Cosmos 1 has sails that are set to disintegrate within a few weeks, the potential to create a long-distance craft is amazing.
"In theory . . . a spacecraft with stronger sails could keep accelerating indefinitely, breaking out of Earth orbit and heading for other planets -- or even the edge of the solar system -- faster than any other spacecraft has gone before. In three years, a solar sail could be traveling faster than 100,000 mph. And it could do it without a drop of onboard fuel."
That's right - 100,000 mph!!
That is why NASA and the Japanese space agency are both hard at work at their own solar-sail crafts.
However, the Planetary Society is proud to be playing a role in prodding the big dogs into moving on solar sail technology. "By committing to a test flight before them, we have put their eyes on the goal," says the executive director of the group, Louis Friedman. And what an exciting goal it is.
Via Wired.
posted by Paul at
3:44 PM
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