selantalksaboutspace:The LightSail craft finally deployed its sail!! If you’ve been following this m
selantalksaboutspace:The LightSail craft finally deployed its sail!! If you’ve been following this mission, you’ll know what a relief this is. The craft shut down pretty much immediately once it was in orbit, then rebooted by random luck, then the battery didn’t work, then the battery started working again, then the sail didn’t want to deploy, and now it’s deployed. pHEW.This particular mission is a proof of concept, so it won’t stay up very long before it falls back to Earth. But it’s pretty cool!! Let me tell you about solar sails.Solar sails are a lot like regular boat sails. On boats, a sail catches the wind and uses its energy to push the boat forward. In space there’s no air to have real wind, but there’s something we call the solar wind–a stream of particles emitted from the sun. If you want to see an example of how the solar wind can move things, look at a comet! A comet’s tail does not trail behind the comet’s nucleus, but rather points away from the sun at all times, because the solar wind is pushing it. Like so:(source: wikipedia) (the stuff with the actual attribution was wigging out on me sry so i’m just going with wikipedia)So a solar sail is a sail made from lightweight materials that catches the solar wind to move a spacecraft forward. It’s a good way to get places with not very much fuel!!So hey, congrats LightSail on your success, and here’s hoping we get to see some cool, sail-propelled spacecraft in the future! -- source link
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