"We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean.
We are ready at last to set sail for the stars."
-
Carl Sagan
Inspirations for setting sail for the stars in science fiction goes back at least as far as
Cordwainer Smith's The Lady who Sailed the Soul published in 1960.
Arthur C. Clarke popularized the idea four years later in his short story
Sunjammer, since reprinted in 1972 under the title
The Wind from the Sun.
I first read about the idea of a spacecraft unfurling a huge but incredibly thin solar sail,in Larry Niven’s sci-fi novel The Mote in God's Eye . His idea was to utilize the pressure of sunlight on the sail - radiation pressure – on a craft weighing several tons that could accelerate to more than a kilometer per second within days, and then go on accelerating so long as it remained relatively close to the sun. It was one of his technological ideas I could understand and it has fascinated me ever since. Niven’s idea is similar to what Xeger discuses in the previous write up. By using giant ground based lasers that would give the craft an initial shove and it would even make it possible to tack the craft by angling the sail. By using the light of the sun which is composed of electromagnetic radiation that exerts force on objects it comes in contact with with a solar sail and lasers the combination would create the potential to send a craft anywhere within the solar system.
Related to many gossamer dreams about space travel, solar sailing is most often read about in science-fiction tales, however using the sun to glide through space has more than just a fictitious etymology; it’s now being given more serious consideration as new materials composed of lightweight carbon fibers only a few microns thick become available. Ed Gabris, a senior engineer at NASA, notes:
"Solar sailing is more than a science fiction fantasy. NASA used solar sailing to increase the experiment time for the Mercury Mariner spaceprobe in 1974-75. The 'sail' was the spacecraft's solar panels. And by controlling the attitude of the spacecraft and the angle of the solar panels to the sun, the operations team was able to cause the spacecraft to visit Mercury several times more than would have been possible with the on-board liquid propulsion system".
The proposal of using the sun's energy to propel spacecraft across the cosmos has been around for centuries, says one expert:
Nearly 400 years ago, as much of Europe was still involved in naval exploration of the world, Johannes Kepler proposed the idea of exploring the galaxy using sails. Through his observation that comet tails were blown around by some kind of solar breeze, he believed sails could capture that wind to propel spacecraft the way winds moved ships on the oceans. While Kepler's idea of a solar wind has been disproven, scientists have since discovered that sunlight does exert enough force to move objects. To take advantage of this force, NASA has been experimenting with giant solar sails that could be pushed through the cosmos by light. There are three components to a solar sail-powered spacecraft:
- Continuous force exerted by sunlight
- A large, ultrathin mirror
- A separate launch vehicle
To give you an idea how fast (solar sailing) is, you could travel from New York to Los Angeles in less than a minute with a solar sail vehicle traveling at top speed…If NASA were to launch an interstellar probe powered by solar sails, it would take only eight years for it to catch the Voyager 1 spacecraft (the most distant spacecraft from Earth), which has been traveling for more than 20 years. By adding a laser or magnetic beam transmitter, NASA said it could push speeds to 18,600 mi/sec (30,000 km/sec), which is one-tenth the speed of light. At those speeds, interstellar travel would be an almost certainty.
Actual theories about solar sailing had their beginnings in the Russian aeronautics pioneer
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and his associate
Fridrickh Tsander. In 1924 they were making notes about
"using tremendous mirrors of very thin sheets" and
"using the pressure of sunlight to attain cosmic velocities". It was American engineer
Richard Garwin who has been attributed with coining the term in the latter part of the 1950s. Early on models included huge aluminum-coated
Mylar sheets that could be aimed at the sun and "blown" toward deep space, powered by sunlight. However, such relatively heavy sails would take a very long time to go anywhere, so scientists have spent years researching and developing fresh kinds of sails and innovative techniques to thrust them into space faster and more efficiently. The promise of solar sailing in space continues, NASA has recently been in the news about awarding funds for the expansion of solar sail hardware and simulation development. The time is coming soon where we can set sail for the stars. A solar sail powered space ship is scheduled to be launched in the fall of 2002:
The Cosmos 1 mission is a joint venture of the Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios, a group of film-makers and writers set up by the widow of scientist and writer Carl Sagan.
The craft will be launched on a rocket fired from a submarine in Russian waters. The solar sail spacecraft will separate from the rocket, then unfurl and fly for a few weeks or months around the Earth pushed by the Sun.
For many space enthusiasts the modest sum of a four million dollars price tag for this
Kitty Hawk moment embodies the future of practical, reasonable and quicker space travel exploration. Soaring through galaxies on sunbeams is magic and I for one can’t wait!
Sources:
How Stuff Works:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/solar-sail1.htm
SPACE.com Exclusive: Breakthrough In Solar Sail Technology:
www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/ carbonsail_000302.html
Space News:
www.cosmiverse.com/news/space/space05150202.html
Turns of Phrases
http://www.quinion.com/words/index.htm