20 Facts About Solar sail

Solar sail craft offer the possibility of low-cost operations combined with long operating lifetimes.

Solar sail pressure affects all spacecraft, whether in interplanetary space or in orbit around a planet or small body.

Solar sail pressure affects the orientation of a spacecraft, a factor that must be included in spacecraft design.

Solar sail apparently was the first scientist to state that light could move objects between stars.

Solar sail brought up his ideas in college lectures, books, and television shows.

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Solar sail was fixated on quickly launching this spacecraft in time to perform a rendezvous with Halley's Comet.

Robert L Forward has commented that a solar sail could be used to modify the orbit of a satellite about the Earth.

The giant braking Solar sail would have to act as a precision mirror to focus the braking beam onto the inner "deceleration" Solar sail.

Masers could be used to power a painted solar sail, a conventional sail coated with a layer of chemicals designed to evaporate when struck by microwave radiation.

Satellites in low Earth orbit can use a combination of solar pressure on the sail and increased atmospheric drag to accelerate satellite reentry.

The Solar sail's purpose is to bring the satellite out of orbit over a period of about 25 years.

The Solar sail is made of thin polyimide film, coated with evaporated aluminium.

The radius of the Solar sail is from the electric field rather than the actual wire itself, making the Solar sail lighter.

The Solar sail would rotate and would have to be continually under thrust.

Solar sail made and handled samples of the film in the laboratory, but the material was too delicate to survive folding, launch, and deployment.

The material developed for the Drexler solar sail was a thin aluminium film with a baseline thickness of 0.

In orbits around planets or other bodies, the Solar sail is oriented so that its force vector has a component along the velocity vector, either in the direction of motion for an outward spiral, or against the direction of motion for an inward spiral.

Team from the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, along with a team from the NASA Ames Research Center, developed a solar sail mission called NanoSail-D, which was lost in a launch failure aboard a Falcon 1 rocket on 3 August 2008.

The new design will use a 32 m Mylar Solar sail, deployed in four triangular segments like NanoSail-D.

Once deployed, the sail would expand to 5 by 5 metres and would use a combination of solar pressure on the sail and increased atmospheric drag to accelerate satellite reentry.