Association Forum - OT: Sails in Space

Assn Members Area · Join

Home.

Association Forum

Ships Store

Cruising

Racing

Technical Tips

Photo Gallery - New

Boat Search - Updated

Manuals & Brochures

Swap Meet

Links

Officer Flag Line & Staff

Bylaws & Constitution

Members Area

Join the Association

Notice:
The advice given on this site is based upon individual or quoted experience, yours may differ.
The Officers, Staff and members of this site only provide information based upon the concept that anyone utilizing this information does so at their own risk and holds harmless all contributors to this site.

Association Forum

Username:	Password:
Save Password
Forgot your Password?

All Forums

Catalina/Capri 25/250 Sailor's Forums

General Sailing Forum

OT: Sails in Space

New Topic

Topic Locked

Printer Friendly

Author

Topic

Voyager
Master Marine Consultant

Member Avatar

USA
5376 Posts

Initially Posted - 01/24/2011 : 19:45:27

So here's NASA's latest cruiser - starting in near-earth orbit:

See the article at
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/24jan_solarsail/

Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology SATellite or FASTSAT.

(Sorry for the huge photo)

The article explains how the mission almost didn't make it.

'In an unexpected reversal of fortune, NASA's NanoSail-D spacecraft has unfurled a gleaming sheet of space-age fabric 650 km above Earth, becoming the first-ever solar sail to circle our planet.
"We're solar sailing!" says NanoSail-D principal investigator Dean Alhorn of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. "This is a momentous achievement.
NanoSail-D spent the previous month and a half stuck inside its mothership, the Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology SATellite (FASTSAT). FASTSAT was launched in November 2010
with NanoSail-D and five other experiments onboard. High above Earth, a spring was supposed to push the breadbox-sized probe into an orbit of its own with room to unfurl a sail.
But when the big moment arrived, NanoSail-D got stuck.
"We couldn't get out of FASTSAT," says Alhorn. "It was heart-wrenching—yet another failure in the long and troubled history of solar sails."
Team members began to give up hope as weeks went by and NanoSail-D remained stubbornly and inexplicably onboard. The mission seemed to be over before it even began.
And then came Jan. 17th. For reasons engineers still don't fully understand, NanoSail-D spontaneously ejected itself. When Alhorn walked into the control room
and saw the telemetry on the screen, he says "I couldn't believe my eyes. Our spacecraft was flying free!" '

While riding solar winds is not as fast as powered flight, and a whole lot slower than ion plasma drives, it doesn't require enormous quantities of fuel to be carried aloft for long voyages.

Too bad, however, there's no way to tack back upwind!

Bruce Ross
Passage ~ SR-FK ~ C25 #5032

Port Captain � Milford, CT

Edited by - on

Stinkpotter
Master Marine Consultant

Members Avatar

Djibouti
9080 Posts

Response Posted - 01/24/2011 : 20:23:17

So, can they reef it for a solar squall?

BTW, your huge picture makes replies tricky--I couldn't find the text box because it was totally off my screen. (Some might say that would have been a good thing, if only I hadn't found it.)