Photo: NASA
As humanity commits itself to become a spacefaring species, many technological advancements have to be made. After all, you can’t really go about colonizing the solar system, and in the long run, other solar systems, using the available technology.
Think, for instance, just how hard and expensive launching stuff off the planet is. Massive rockets, needed to carry the enormous amount of fuel required to defeat Earth’s gravity, are built and then quickly discarded. Then, consider the amount of fuel spaceships have to carry with them to reach their destination and, in some cases, make the trip back.
Until something like a space elevator comes along, we’ll have to continue making big rockets that get thrown away. But we can do something to perhaps completely eliminate the need for fuel tanks being incorporated in the design of future spacecraft.
There are several alternative means of propulsion in space currently being researched, but few of them come with as much promise as solar sails. You know, that piece of technology that can help spaceships move about using nothing more than the pressure of sunlight.
We’re probably still a very long way from this tech becoming a reality, but people and organizations, like the Planetary Society, are trying. And so is NASA, which this week gave us a few more details on what it calls “new deployable structures and materials” for solar sails.
The agency will test them through a mission called Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, or ACS3. It will be launched in 2022 as a CubeSat that holds a solar sail that deploys thanks to brand-new, and possibly revolutionary booms.
These parts are made of composite materials and are reinforced with carbon fiber. They can be rolled up as not to occupy a lot of space, are 75 percent lighter, and come with 100 times less in-space thermal distortion than metallic deployable booms. In theory, they could also be used indefinitely, as the sails they support will never run out of fuel.
During the 2022 mission, the solar sail launched by NASA will end up measuring once deployed 81 square meters (871 square feet). If all goes well, the agency sees no problem scaling the tech for 500-square meter (5,400-square foot) or even 2,000-square meter (21,500-square foot) systems.
NASA sees the tech perfect for use for “for space weather early-warning satellites, near-Earth asteroid reconnaissance missions, or communications relays for crewed exploration missions.”
Until something like a space elevator comes along, we’ll have to continue making big rockets that get thrown away. But we can do something to perhaps completely eliminate the need for fuel tanks being incorporated in the design of future spacecraft.
There are several alternative means of propulsion in space currently being researched, but few of them come with as much promise as solar sails. You know, that piece of technology that can help spaceships move about using nothing more than the pressure of sunlight.
We’re probably still a very long way from this tech becoming a reality, but people and organizations, like the Planetary Society, are trying. And so is NASA, which this week gave us a few more details on what it calls “new deployable structures and materials” for solar sails.
The agency will test them through a mission called Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, or ACS3. It will be launched in 2022 as a CubeSat that holds a solar sail that deploys thanks to brand-new, and possibly revolutionary booms.
These parts are made of composite materials and are reinforced with carbon fiber. They can be rolled up as not to occupy a lot of space, are 75 percent lighter, and come with 100 times less in-space thermal distortion than metallic deployable booms. In theory, they could also be used indefinitely, as the sails they support will never run out of fuel.
During the 2022 mission, the solar sail launched by NASA will end up measuring once deployed 81 square meters (871 square feet). If all goes well, the agency sees no problem scaling the tech for 500-square meter (5,400-square foot) or even 2,000-square meter (21,500-square foot) systems.
NASA sees the tech perfect for use for “for space weather early-warning satellites, near-Earth asteroid reconnaissance missions, or communications relays for crewed exploration missions.”
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