First Solar Sail To Launch Today
Jun 21
Posted: under Technology.
The first ship to utilize a solar sail, Cosmos 1, launches later this afternoon (3:46 PM Eastern time). The site has a countdown timer.
A solar sail is a method of propulsion whereby a ship uses huge sails to actually catch photons (light) and propel it. It may sound ridiculous, but with big enough sails and a ship with a small enough mass it should be perfectly possible. Of course you have to keep in mind that it takes much less force to propel something in space than it does on a planet. There’s also that whole law (one of newton’s I believe) that says a body in motion will stay in motion until acted upon by some force….. Once it gets moving (and out of orbit….free of Earth’s gravity) it would actually just speed up over time until it comes across something to stop it from doing so.
The plan for Cosmos 1 is pretty simple. They’ll launch it into orbit (from a Russian sub in an old ICBM (with Cosmos 1 as the warhead) none-the-less), test it’s systems for a few days, and then deploy the sails. After a couple more days, they’ll position the sails so that the spacecraft should begin to gain speed in an attempt to bring it into a higher orbit. About a month after deployment, they expect the sails to fail. Depending on how well the test goes, Cosmos 1 will either be in a sufficiently high orbit to stay there, or else it will be too low and it’s orbit will degrade over time until it eventually re-enters the atmosphere.
I also thought it was funny interesting that Bill Nye (as in Bill Nye the Science Guy) is the VP of the people responsible for the project.
