Music
One of the main targets
for this demonstration is
we are going to demonstrate
navigation, demonstrate
capable navigation. Solar
Sails have been used before
and they've flown before,
but what we offer is something
that a mission planner
could pull off a shelf and
say that's a technnology
that would work for flying my
instrument. The solar sails
that have flown before have
only been to demonstrate
the concept of solar thrust
and solar propulsion. But
what we are aiming to do is
take that to the next step
and take that inot navigation
and actually fly to
someplace useful that only a
solar sail can do. We have
radiation pressure and we
have solar wind. What we are
going to use it the radiation
pressure. There is a
phenomenon, a photon which is massless
but still has momentum
react with a surface and then
bounces back off. It creates
a very tiny tiny pressure
but it is a presssure
nonetheless. And once we are
in the weightlessness of
space any pressure will turn
into a force and F=ma, we'll
get a small accelleration.
So what the solar sail
consists of is a great giant
area of reflective material
that's capturing all that
solar pressure and using it
to impart accelleration of
a small craft. So what we
are targeting for this program
is a solar sail with an
area of roughly 1200 square
meters, so we are in the
neighborhood of about a
quarter of a football field
if you will. With that we'll
create roughly one gram of
thrust. So it is very low
right, it is equivilent to
about the weight of a pink
sweet-n-low
sugar packet.
But what we can do with that
is, if we are careful, we
very long period of time
and we can do some useful
navigation with it. Music.
The solar flares from the sun
obviously reek havoc or can
reek havoc on satellites and
even the power grid on the
earth. So what NOAA offers to
operators and to power grid
operators is advanced warning
though the means of this
satellite that they have positioned
at L1... which is a LaGrange
point between earth and the
sun. They offer this advance
warning as the result of the
data they get from the
satellite called ACE. Now that is
at L1. Now what the solar sail
can offer and this is one of
the places we want to sail
to is that we could create a
psuedo Lagrange point that is
farther in towards the sun than
L1. We'd actually double the
distance to the earth as ACE
is. So if they have X minutes
of warning time from ACE, we
could double that and we could
offer satellite operators and
power grid operators twice
the warning time. The Lagrange
point exists because the
earth is pulling on it the sun
is pulling on it and there
is some centripidal force that
is swinging away from the sun
too. So it is the amalgumation
of those three forces that
creates that gravitationally
neutral point. Now we are
going to offset some of that
sun's gravity with that one
gram of thrust. And we can fly a
little closer to the sun
and create that extra neutral
point there and and we will
be a little farther in. We last
built a solar sail the one
deployed at the Plumbrook chamber
there in 2004 and 2005. And
we a ssembled it, I beleive
the test was in 2005. So our
first goal is to revitalize
that, this is no mean feat to
create something that gossamer
and controlably deploy it.
Our flight right now, we'are
scheduling somewhere in the
4th quarter of 2014. Now the
flight is supposed to be
on a secondary Falcon 9 GTO
launch... hopefully. Falcon 9
has cleared the tower. We would
take any secondary flight we
could take, the GTO launch offers
us some unique capabilities
for the demonstration.