The American space agency (NASA)’s new generation solar sail, the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3), has launched. Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket launched the satellite from New Zealand at 1:30 a.m. Hungarian time on Wednesday into orbit at an altitude of 1,000 kilometers, where it will deploy its solar sail within a month or two.
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The ACS3 is a solar sail
Illustration by NASA/Aero Animation/Ben Schweighart
The main purpose of the technology demonstrator satellite, the size of a microwave oven, is to test new masts made of bendable polymer and carbon fiber materials. The structures, which are seven meters long but can be folded up and fit in the hand, will stretch an 80 square meter solar sail that will take up roughly the parking space of six cars.
Cameras will record the sail’s unpacking, and then engineers will begin testing its capabilities and how much the beam pressure of light hitting the sail from the Sun will accelerate the satellite.
“The masts were usually either made of metal and heavy, or they were made of lightweight but overly bulky composites—neither of which fit very well with today’s small probes. Solar sails need huge, stable and light masts that can be folded into a very small space,” said Keats Wilkie, a scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center who is leading the mission.
According to NASA, the orbiting solar sail almost twice as far away as the International Space Station will also be able to be observed from Earth. Once the sail is fully deployed and turned into the correct position, the satellite will be as visible as Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.
In the future, the masts used now could hold a 500-square-meter solar sail, the size of a basketball court, and with the development of technology, its size could reach four times that, 2,000 square meters. “Our hope is that the technologies we’re testing on this probe will inspire others to use them in ways we haven’t even thought of,” said mission lead engineer Alan Rhodes of NASA’s Ames Research Institute.
If the satellite is successful, it could pave the way for more serious missions that would monitor the Sun’s activity from special orbits to warn of coronal mass ejections (CMEs). They could also visit nearby celestial bodies such as the Moon or Mars.
“The Sun will continue to shine for billions of years, so it will provide inexhaustible propulsion,” said Rhodes, who says that instead of launching huge fuel tanks with future missions, we could launch large sails that utilize this “fuel” from the Sun.
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The IKAROS solar yacht
Photo: JAXA
The first solar sail, IKAROS, was launched in May 2010 by the Japan Space Agency (JAXA). A few months later, the spacecraft passed 80,000 kilometers from Venus, which successfully proved the functionality of the technology and that it could be used for solar system research probes.
