Sailing Through The Space : The Brilliant Science Behind Project LightSail

cover : Josh Spradling / The Planetary Society [4]

Space traveling to farther stars and planets outside of our own solar system seemed just as a dream for many people throughout the history. Since the launching of the first space craft Sputnik 1, people have wondered how far we as a species can go with the space crafts, and this issue has been a concern for science-fiction literature for decades. In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick created the story ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ simultaneously as a novel and a film. Then, space traveling appeared on TV shows such as Star Trek (1966-1969), The Jetsons (1962) and Astro Boy (1963).

All in all, space travel has always intrigued humankind as it brings out our ancient curiosity and interest towards space. For this reason, we as human beings desire to explore space and star systems and galaxies, perhaps we can find out that we are not alone. Institutions and corporations such as NASA and Russian Space Research Institute (Institut Kosmicheskikh Issledovaniy) have been doing researches to find ways to make the dream of space traveling and exploration a reality. Being started with Sputnik 1 and continued with building space stations and landing on the moon, the journey has finally taken a turn for more exciting and brilliant things such as the LightSail project that has been conducted in NASA headquarters. The exciting part is that it promises to reach for the sky and to go faster in space than ever before.

The idea of ‘sailing’ space craft is not something that has existed recently. Carl Sagan talked about the Solar Sail mission in the 1970’s in various occasions from talk shows to university lectures. Bill Nye, the CEO of Planetary Society, refers to his memories: “I was in astronomy class in 1977 and Carl Sagan was talking about a solar sail mission.”. The Planetary Society has been working on this project with NASA since the 1970’s. Carl Sagan was a big supporter of the idea itself.

The concept and idea of the space craft is fairly simple when its technical details are looked over. The solar sail’s propulsion relies on solar radiation. The Planetary Society explains the mechanism: “Solar photons exert radiation pressure on the sail which gives acceleration to the space craft relative to the ratio of the sail’s area to its mass.”. In another saying, the sun light is collected and the motion is generated by the light constantly and that way the space craft propels. Solar radiation is collected by Mylar or polyimide materials coated with a metallic reflective matter. The sails’ size depends on how far it aims to go. The LightSail 2 which was launched in may 2, 2015 had sails which their combined area is 32 square meters (344 square feet), about the size of a boxing ring.

All of these researches have given positive results so far which excites many people as we are capable of reaching other stars in a relatively short time. Depending on the size of the sails, it is estimated that we can go faster, yet we still have a lot of progress to make and scientific developments to go through to reach other star systems and travel through space as the nearest star to our solar system ‘Proxima Centauri’ which is 4,243 light years away from us. Still, it seems like we have found a way to travel lighter and faster which is a significant development. Even though space travel seems still a bit out of reach, we are making progress day by day. And the space travel to farther star systems is left to our imagination and our literature for the foreseeable future.

NASA and the Planetary Society have been working to make this idea happen. NASA and industry manufacturer L’Garde Inc. started to lead the project between 2005 and 2006. The researches and experiments began to be conducted. Once these experiments brought to successful conclusions, NASA was ready to demonstrate a test flight with their designed solar sail craft ‘Sunjammer’ in 2015 by launching a Falcon 9 rocket on-board. Later, the sails were to unfurl and spread to catch the radiations from the sun. Then, the researches ran tests on the solar sail craft to measure its stability and attitude control. In addition to this, they determined that the navigation sequences matched with preciseness in majority with the assigned mission.

 

 

 

 

Resources

• Wikipedia contributors. (2021, May 7). Solar sail. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail
• Solar sail. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved June 6, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail
• Anderson, H. (2019, June 21). As a scientist, many of Arthur C Clarke’s predictions for the future came true. But his wildly imaginative science-fiction writing is his greatest legacy. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190621-the-man-who-created-our-vision-of-space
• Proxima Centauri. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved June 6, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri
• Solar Sail Demonstrator (‘Sunjammer’). (n.d.). NASA. Retrieved June 6, 2021, from https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/tdm/solarsail/index.html
• Grossman, D. (2019, June 21). Carl Sagan’s Solar Sail Is Finally Ready To Fly. Popular Mechanics. https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/a28138148/solar-sail-ready-to-fly/

Image Resources

 

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey Filminin Bölüm Bölüm Alt Metin Açıklaması. 1. (2019, February 28). Ekşi Şeyler. https://seyler.eksisozluk.com/2001-a-space-odyssey-filminin-bolum-bolum-alt-metin-aciklamasi
2. IKAROS, & Mirecki, A. (2011, March 20). Artist’s depiction of a Solar Sail in flight [Illustration]. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail#/media/File:IKAROS_solar_sail.jpg
3. NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center. (2009, June 20). NASA illustration of the unlit side of a half-kilometre solar sail [Illustration]. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail#/media/File:Solarsail_msfc.jpg
4. What is Solar Sailing? (n.d.). Planetary Society. Retrieved May 31, 2021, from https://www.planetary.org/articles/what-is-solar-sailing