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It might not get you all the way to Cardassia Prime, but NASA hopes its newly launched solar-sail Sunjammer program will lead to a future where propellantless space craft are used for a multitude of functions beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Once proven, solar sail technology could enable a host of versatile space missions, including flying an advanced space-weather warning system to more quickly and accurately alert satellite operators and utilities on Earth of geomagnetic storms caused by coronal mass ejections from the sun,” NASA said in a release.
Additionally, NASA sees the project as something that can work to help clean up the piles of floating space garbage in orbit.
Solar Sail Demonstration: Key Mission Facts From NASA
The L’Garde Technology Demonstration Mission solar sail will have seven times the area (1200m^2) of the largest sail ever flown before in space.
At just over 70 pounds, this solar sail demonstrator will weigh 10 times less than the largest sail ever flown in space.
The L’Garde solar sail will produce a maximum thrust of approximately 0.01 newton, which is roughly equivalent to the weight of a “pink packet” of artificial sweetener.
This solar sail demonstrator is truly propellantless — it will use control vanes for attitude control.
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“The technology also could provide an economical solution to removing some of the more than 8,000 pieces of orbital launch debris ringing the planet; conduct station-keeping operations, or hover at high latitudes above Earth for communications and observation; and could drive a variety of propellantless, deep-space exploration and supply ferrying missions.”
Solar sails work by capturing the sun’s rays and using that pressure to move forward in frictionless space. There are many benefits to a solar sail, specifically, that crafts that use them don’t need any propellant, or large amounts of fuel and that the sail itself, while large, is usually quite light.
This isn’t the first solar sail that NASA has deployed, there was a test called the NanoSail-D in 2011 that had an area of 100-square feet. The sail for the Sunjammer program will be 130 times larger than that at 13,000 square feet. However, NASA has said that the sail won’t be especially ungainly.
“[That's] a third of an acre…. But when collapsed, it’s the size of a dishwasher and weighs just 70 pounds. Attached to a 175-pound disposable support module, the Sunjammer is easily packed into a secondary payload on a rocket bound for low-Earth orbit,” the release says.
The Sunjammer name comes from a 1964 Arthur C. Clarke story about “solar sailing” where the sails were used to reach near-light speeds in a very short time frame. The real-life solar sails won’t be able to match that at all. Although there is no theoretical top speed for a solar sail device, the “sail will produce a maximum thrust of approximately 0.01 newton, which is roughly equivalent to the weight of a ‘pink packet’ of artificial sweetener,” so it won’t be accelerating anywhere especially fast. The trick is that once it starts moving it takes a lot to slow it down.
