After a failure, a new craft to sail.Engineers have long envisioned replacing heavy rocket fuels with a solar sail solar sail A saillike device that is made of lightweight and highly reflective material and attached to a spacecraft to harness the radiation pressure of the solar wind and light for propulsion. Also called light sail. that would use the steady push of sunlight against an ultrathin ul·tra·thin adj. Very thin. , highly reflective surface (SN: 8/21/99, p. 120). They're getting closer to propelling a spacecraft in this way. Despite the July 20 failure of its mission to test the unfurling of a solar sail in a suborbital suborbital /sub·or·bi·tal/ (sub-or´bi-t'l) infraorbital. sub·or·bit·al adj. Situated on or below the floor of the orbit of the eye. n. trajectory, the Planetary Society The Planetary Society is a large, publicly supported, not-for-profit organization that has many research projects related to astronomy. It is based in Pasadena, California (the same city as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory) but has an international membership. of Pasadena, Calif., announced plans last month to conduct a second test of a sail-propelled craft. Scheduled for launch early next year, the craft would evaluate for the first time both the deployment and operation of a solar sail in full orbit around Earth. The July mission was launched from a Russian submarine in the Barents Sea, but the third stage of the launch rocket, a converted intercontinental ballistic missile intercontinental ballistic missile: see guided missile. , did not separate. Therefore, the blades of the solar sail never inflated. The new craft, which is part of the privately funded Cosmos 1 project, also will be launched from the Barents Sea, says Louis J. Friedman, executive director of the society. The project aims to use the solar-powered sail to slowly expand the orbit of a spacecraft, moving it farther and farther from Earth. |
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