NASA Marshall Space Flight Center technologists
In his youth, NASA technologist
NASA continues to unfurl plans for solar sail technology as a promising method of deep space transportation. The agency cleared a key technology milestone in January with the successful deployment of one of four identical solar sail quadrants. The deployment was showcased
NASA and industry partners used two 100-foot lightweight composite booms to stretch out a 4,445-square-footsquare-foot (400-square-meter) prototype solar sail quadrant for the first time
The sail is a propulsion system powered by sunlight reflecting from the sail, much like a sailboat reflects the wind. While just one quarter of the sail was unfurled in the deployment at
'This was a major last step on the ground before it's ready to be proposed for space missions,' Johnson, who has been involved with sail technology at
A solar sail traveling through deep space provides many potential benefits to missions using the technology because it doesn't require any fuel, allowing very high propulsive performance with very little mass. This in-space propulsion system is well suited for low-mass missions in novel orbits.
'Once you get away from Earth's gravity and into space, what is important is efficiency and enough thrust to travel from one position to another,' Johnson said.
A solar sail achieves that by reflecting sunlight - the greater the size of the sail, the greater thrust it can provide.
Some of the missions of interest using solar sail technology include studying space weather and its effects on the Earth, or for advanced studies of the north and south poles of the Sun. The latter has been limited because the propulsion required to get a spacecraft into a polar orbit around the sun is very high and simply not feasible using most of the propulsion systems available today. Solar sail propulsion is also possible for enhancing future missions to Venus or Mercury, given their closeness to the Sun and the enhanced thrust a solar sail would achieve in the more intense sunlight there.
Moreover, it's the ultimate green propulsion system, Johnson said - as long as the Sun is shining, the sail will have propulsion. Where the sunlight is less, he envisions a future where lasers could be used to accelerate the solar sails to high speeds, pushing them outside the solar system and beyond, perhaps even to another star. 'In the future, we might place big lasers in space that shine their beams on the sails as they depart the solar system, accelerating them to higher and higher speeds, until eventually they are going fast enough to reach another star in a reasonable amount of time.'
To learn more about solar sails and other NASA advanced space technology, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/space-technology-mission-directorate
Marshall Space Flight Center,
256-544-0034
jonathan.e.deal@nasa.gov
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