Thursday, August 27, 2015

What's going on in the Sky: Sailing by light

Will not it be nice if we could perhaps travel to other planets on a watercraft that requires no fuel tanks, low thrusters, no complex motors, sends, wiring or tubing? How about a nice spacecraft that can operate on solar energy on its own, and I don't mean solar panels driving electric motors.

In fact , it has happened to be done. In May of 2010, Asia launched the IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun) spacecraft on a mission that would remove it to Venus and then continue for orbit around the sun. And on May 14, the Planetary Society successfully was introduced LightSail, a prototype craft that could test the feasibility of using sunlight radiation for not only propulsion, and furthermore navigation.

But let's back up a second and look at the concept of solar soccer. Light consists of packets of energy declared photons and, although they have no standard, photons have momentum. When they turn up a shiny surface, a lot of perfect momentum is transferred, giving the counter a small impulse or push. Ones force is tiny but it can be constant and a small force shoving for a long time can create a large change in acceleration.

The Planetary Society's LightSail (www.planetary.org) uses a new type of miniature spacecraft called CubeSats. CubeSats are cube, 10 cm on a side, they are simply combined to form larger spacecraft. LightSail consists of three such units piled together measuring 10-by-10-by-30 centimeters, all around the size of a loaf of bread.

Hitching a nice ride on an Atlas V look like whose prime payload is a sorted USAF mission, LightSail is currently orbiting earth but has not yet unfurled its sails. That will happen subsequently, after four weeks of thorough testing involving its avionic and electronic computers. After the waiting period, the sails will be deployed and the spacecraft is without a doubt propelled by solar radiation. Drawback is that this will greatly increase the atmospheric drag, causing the spacecraft to enter the atmosphere in about a while.

This is all in the plan, however , since this is a test flight, designed to gather history and "shake down" all computers. The second mission, scheduled for a 2016 launch, will be aboard SpaceX's new-found Falcon Heavy rocket, which will remove it to a higher orbit (almost 450 miles) where it will not be as greatly battling with earth's atmosphere. It is hoped that the will lay the foundation for capacity interplanetary or even interstellar missions in later life.

Finally, I hope you have been following Beldad and Jupiter in the western stars after sunset. You won't is usually miss their close encounter on the event of June 30 when they vital "stars" of everything up in the stars.

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