NASA Will Launch A 13,000-Square-Foot Solar Sail Next Year

The largest solar sail the solar system has ever seen weighs only 70 pounds.

By Clay Dillow Posted 01.31.2013 at 3:36 pm 12 Comments

Sunjammer, The World's Largest Solar Sail Demonstrator L’Garde

NASA’s new heavy lift rocket isn’t the only massive space propulsion system the agency has in the works. The largest solar sail the solar system has ever known is headed to the launchpad in 2014 on a mission that will eventually take it nearly 2 million miles from Earth. The demonstrator mission aims to show that the technology lessons learned from NASA’s smaller NanoSail-D mission and JAXA’s IKAROS solar sailing space vehicle can be leveraged into a large-scale space-traversing propellantless propulsion system.

The Sunjammer mission--the name is borrowed from an Arthur C. Clarke short story about an interplanetary yacht race--will unfurl a solar sail that dwarfs those that have thus far been tested in space. Where NanoSail-D’s diminutive sail measured just 100 square feet and Japan’s IKAROS measures something like 2,000 square feet, Sunjammer’s sail possesses a total surface area of nearly 13,000 square feet. Yet collapsed it weighs just 70 pounds and takes up about as much space as a dishwasher, making it easy to stow in the secondary payload bay of a rocket headed to low Earth orbit.

The sail will be made of Kapton, a super-thin film developed by DuPont that is used in all kinds of things, from space suits to flexible circuitry. The special layer of Kapton film developed by DuPont along with NASA is just 5 microns thick. Once unfurled, it is light enough that its own weight isn’t a hindrance yet strong enough that it can tow a support module across space using pressure provided by the sun in the form of photons as propellant, much as a maritime sail uses the wind to pull a sailboat across a body of water.

The destination for Sunjammer is the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1, a gravitationally stable spot way out there between us and our nearest star. And while Sunjammer is a demonstration mission and won’t be pulling an independent scientific mission along with it, the technology it is expected to enable could allow for a range of missions that are currently not possible with conventional chemical propellant systems. Particularly applicable would be missions to build a sun-monitoring space weather warning system, which could help protect infrastructure here on Earth from potentially harmful solar flares.

But Sunjammer does have a mission profile. Via Houston-based company Celestis Inc., Sunjammer will be carrying the cremated remains of various individuals, including Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and his wife Majel Barrett Roddenberry. It’s not exactly the Enterprise, but Sunjammer will be boldly going where no solar sailing spacecraft has gone before.

[SPACE]

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12 Comments

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Robot

01/31/13 at 3:53 pm

A cosmic kite strung out of notary dead people, omg!

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Peter10

01/31/13 at 4:45 pm

Foot, feet, pounds, miles, microns? Sorry, don't you have microinches somewhere in the closet? I think it's about time to get the metric system introduced everywhere, so that your "seudo-scientific" articles get readable?

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theHuntronTracker

01/31/13 at 5:07 pm

What's psuedo-science about a project NASA has planned for the near future? Why complain about the standard we Americans use while reading an American publication?

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kflotlin

01/31/13 at 6:10 pm

Hang on, if this is propelled by photons, how is its target located toward the sun instead of away from it?

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simski

01/31/13 at 7:50 pm

I'm pretty sure NASA is using the metric system themselves.

@kflotlin: I'm not sure if the solar sail works exactly like a sail, but sailboats can go towards the wind, I think it's called either "beating" or "windwarding" in English.

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quasi44

01/31/13 at 7:56 pm

Gotta love windsurfing on such a scale. Things will be better when we've moved up to surfboards with The Power Cosmic. We should make a Cup Race soon. Think about it. With the cash outlay on a modern typical 40 meter America's Cup yacht and team support and logistics, it could be done today.

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01/31/13 at 9:05 pm

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Mukuro Holmes

01/31/13 at 9:50 pm

This will be very practical for lunar towing missions in that stretch of space between Earth and the moon.

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generalsnozzie

02/01/13 at 12:38 am

Is this the same project that the Planetary Society directed by Bill Nye is a part of?

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Kevin Elzinga 1

02/01/13 at 5:03 am

It is a little odd that the solar sail is heading to a point BETWEEN the earth and our sun. So it is, supposedly, heading towards the sun.

The only direction photons head in space is AWAY from the sun and, unlike sail boats here on earth, a solar sail cannot exactly tack against the solar wind.

To my knowledge, The Bernoulli Effect does not apply to photons. It is a phenomenon that manifests itself soley in a gaseous environment.

I am guessing that the only way they can get it to where it needs to go is to have it slingshot around several of our planets in a carefully orchestrated trip.

Once it has the momentum it needs, I suppose gravity will steer the ship.

As much as I think this is cool, I don't see too much practical use for interstellar flight. By the time a solar sail gets to Pluto, it is experiencing maybe 1/1000 the force that it is here near earth.

This may be useful for interplanetary travel, but I think the speed of the ship is limited by how much momentum the solar wind can impart to the ship and by the amount of energy our largest planet can impart to the ship in a gravity slingshot.

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salopianjerel

02/02/13 at 8:16 am

How to tack towards the sun

http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~diedrich/solarsails/intro/tacking.html