From the category archives:

Sail Concepts

Statites: Hovering Over the Pole

July 29, 2010

Robert Forward’s Indistinguishable from Magic is a genial and absorbing read, a collection of essays and fiction illustrating some of the scientist’s most memorable ideas. And while gigantic lightsails driven by laser beam to other stars always come to mind when Forward’s name is mentioned, it’s fascinating to page through his thoughts on antimatter, black [...]

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Solar Sailing’s ‘Gossamer Road’

July 23, 2010

With more attention now being focused on possible missions to an asteroid, we should keep in mind that DLR, the German Aerospace Center, has been looking into an asteroid mission via solar sail for some time now. One 2006 paper from DLR’s Institute of Space Simulation pondered a 70-meter sail for use in a projected [...]

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The Solar Sail in Context

July 22, 2010

The final day of the Second International Symposium on Solar Sailing (ISSS 2010) kicks off this morning with Roman Kezerashvili (City University of New York) discussing solar sail missions as a way of testing fundamental physics. Last year in Aosta I listened with fascination as Kezerashvili discussed close solar passes (‘Sundiver’ missions) that could approach [...]

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Musings on Sails and Stars

July 20, 2010

Solar Sails in Brooklyn I should probably clean out my office, and would, if I could find the time, but things keep happening in the deep space community and I keep writing about them. I had the program for ISSS 2010 (the Second International Symposium on Solar Sailing) right beside me when I started to [...]

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IKAROS Powers Up; LightSail-1 Passes Review

June 29, 2010

The solar sail news continues to be positive, a welcome relief after so many years of delay and frustration. Now that we finally have an operational sail in space, it’s worth noting how the Japanese IKAROS sail differs from earlier sail concepts. For IKAROS is designed to use two kinds of power. The first comes [...]

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Views of IKAROS (and a Memory)

June 16, 2010

This is what a solar sail looks like in space. The images below were taken by a camera flown aboard the IKAROS mission and then separated from it using a spring, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). These pictures (and you can find several more here) take me back to my first reading [...]

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IKAROS Deployment in Translation

June 11, 2010

For those of you interested in the key IKAROS post describing the final deployment of the sail, Lionel Ward has been so kind as to translate it in context. I’m leaving out the actual photographs, which you can see via the links posted in my previous IKAROS coverage — and also here in context — [...]

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IKAROS Deployment Photos Arriving

June 11, 2010

IKAROS now appears to be fully deployed and generating power from its photovoltaic cells. The IKAROS blog even has a photo of the cake with which the sail team celebrated the success, but you’ll also want to go to this IKAROS page for a look at further imagery, one of which is the photo shown [...]

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IKAROS Sail Deployment in Progress

June 9, 2010

Update: The IKAROS blog reports “The operation ended today as planned.” That must count as good news for the sail, now 7,480,787 kilometers from Earth, but we still need confirmation that the sail’s ‘secondary’ deployment is now complete. Maybe this is it: Japanese space journalist Mitsunari Kita, who is attending a press conference re the [...]

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IKAROS Nears Full Deployment Attempt

June 8, 2010

Update: The IKAROS team has not confirmed full deployment of the sail, but does indicate we’ll have an update tomorrow. The IKAROS solar sail is partially deployed but the complete deployment was delayed while the mission’s engineers tried to figure out why the spacecraft’s spin rate has been increasing. JAXA’s updates are in Japanese, but [...]

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