Edward
Montgomery's team and a team from Ames Research Center hope to deploy a solar
sail called NanoSail-D this summer.
A SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket will carry it into space from Omelek Island in the Pacific Ocean between July 29th to August 6th.
"NanoSail-D
will be the first fully deployed solar sail in space, and the first spacecraft
to use solar pressure as a primary means of attitude control or orbital
maneuvering," says Montgomery, who is NanoSail-D's payload manager.
"We are always on the lookout for opportunities. Ames owns a slot on the Falcon 1 launch and asked us if we wanted to go along. We said,
'Yes!' We'll use the Poly Picosatellite Orbital Deployer, or P-POD, developed by
the University of California Polytechnic Institute to deploy our sail."
If successful, this will be the first deployment of a solar
sail. An earlier effort mounted by the Planetary Society, Cosmos
I, failed three years ago. Science fiction fans have been looking forward
to this for generations. As Arthur C. Clarke's wrote in his 1964 short story Sunjammer.
"Hold your hands out to the sun. What do you feel?
Heat, of course. But there's pressure as well — though you've never noticed it,
because it's so tiny. Over the area of your hands, it only comes to about a
millionth of an ounce. But out in space, even a pressure as small as that can
be important — for it's acting all the time, hour after hour, day after day.
Unlike rocket fuel, it's free and unlimited. If we want to, we can use it; we
can build sails to catch the radiation blowing from the sun."
It seems incredible, but the basic idea that light pressure
would provide a mechanical means of propulsion may be found in Jules Verne's
1867 novel From
the Earth to the Moon:
" ...
there will some day appear velocities far greater than these, of which light or
electricity will probably be the mechanical agent ... "
(Read more)
This is particularly noteworthy since the existence of light
pressure was not even proven in theory until 1873 (by James Clerk Maxwell).
The Russian theoretician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky worked on
the idea of solar sailing in the 1920's, but the first work to spark the
interest of scientists and sf writers came in 1951, with the publication of
"Clipper Ships of Space." This Astounding Science Fiction
article was not a story, but an exposition of the principles of solar sails.
Cordwainer Smith wrote what was probably the first actual
story about solar sails in 1960. "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul"
took place in the far future, when people ventured on decades-long voyages in
ships equipped with solar sails "tissue-metal wings with which the bodies
of people finally fluttered out among the stars."
Soon thereafter, a 1962 short story by Jack Vance
appeared - a classic named "Sail 25." This
is the story of a "sink-or-swim" training cruise in which six space
cadets find themselves under the unforgiving tutelage of Henry Belt, who stated
that it was his fate to one day die in space.
Cordwainer Smith wrote another story in 1963 with more
descriptions of this technology: "immense sails - huge films assorted in
space on long, rigid, coldproof rigging."
See this NanoSail-D
deployment video; via NASA.
(This Science Fiction in the News story used with
permission of Technovelgy.com)
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