p2pnet - rss feed: World’s 1st Space Sail ready
p2pnet.net OT News:- It’s truly the stuff of science fiction.
The world’s first fuelless solar sail spacecraft is scheduled for launch from a Russian nuclear submarine at 12:46 pm PDT today.
Its creators hope it’ll sail in space, propelled by the power of the sun.
Cosmos 1 is a $4 million operation privately funded by Ann Druyan’s entertainment company and contributions from Planetary Society members and Peter Lewis, a Philanthropist, says CoolTechZone, going on:
“Researchers believe with sunlight as Cosmos 1’s fuel, it would be able to explore unimaginable distances. The Cosmos 1 will be propelled into the orbit via a constant stream of photons bouncing of the interior of the spacecraft. Researchers also believe the spacecraft’s speed would increase as it further enters space.
“The project was started by Carl Sagan, a science fiction author, and Louis Friedman, who proposed an idea to send a solar sail spacecraft with Halley’s comet in the 1970s when he was also working at NASA.”
The space sail has been loaded into a launch tube on the Borisoglebsk, a Russian Delta III nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea, says Spaceflight Now.
A 45-foot Volna rocket will launch at around 1946 GMT and, "The retired warrior’s first three stages will place the pioneer Cosmos 1 solar sail into a suborbital trajectory," says the story.
"A specially-designed kick motor will then fire for almost four minutes to finish the task of placing Cosmos 1 into an orbit about 500 miles in altitude with an inclination of 80 degrees."
Cosmos 1 was created to test the feasibility of using solar energy to propel spacecraft without the need for large rockets and chemical fuels.
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See:-
CoolTechZone - Private solar sail orbiter gets ready for launch, June 20, 2005
Spaceflight Now - Pioneering solar sail experiment launches today, June 21, 2005
June 21st, 2005 at 10:13 pm
Nice idea.
Unfortunately the number of photons on the sail goes as the square of its distance from the Sun. So the thrust is going quickly drop to zero.
Perhaps it’s OK for trips to the terrestrial planets but nothing more.
June 23rd, 2005 at 3:47 am
I think the idea is to fire lasers at the sail to pick up the slack as solar energy diminishes - at least, that’s the idea …
June 29th, 2005 at 5:04 pm
Sorry, conservation of momentum precludes this possibility.
If you fire a laser at the sail, the laser will receive the same impulse in the opposite direction as the sail. So unless you are running it from a point not attached to the actual ship (such as Earth, which is impossible to do at great distances due to the finite dispersion of the laser beam) it wont do any work.
Trust me I know what I’m talking about when it comes to physics.