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Planetary News: Cosmos 1 - Solar Sail (2004)Japanese Researchers Successfully Test Unfurling of Solar Sail on Rocket FlightBy Amir Alexander10 August 2004 The Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) has successfully tested the unfurling of two solar sail designs on a rocket flight. The sails were launched on board a small S-310 sounding rocket at 3:15pm Japan Standard Time (8:15am GMT) on Monday, August 9, 2004, from the Uchinoura Space Center in Kagoshima, Japan. A sail arrangement referred to as “clover type,” composed of four separate segments, deployed successfully 100 seconds after launch, at an altitude of 122 kilometers. Seconds later, at an altitude of 169 kilometers, the “clover” was jettisoned and a six segment “fan type” was unfurled in its place. Six minutes and forty seconds after the launch the rocket plunged into the ocean and the test was over. "The Japanese space agency’s achievement is a valuable contribution to the development of solar sail flight,” said Louis Friedman, Executive Director of The Planetary Society. “The deployment of the gossamer-like sail cannot be simulated well on Earth, and their rocket flight test will help build experience and confidence for everyone awaiting solar sail flight. Well done." A solar sail is a spacecraft without an engine. It is propelled forward by the pressure of photons from the Sun reflecting off enormous bright surfaces known as “sails.” Because it carries no fuel and keeps accelerating over almost unlimited distances, some scientists believe it is the technology most likely to someday take us to the stars. The sails have to be rigid, strong, and light, and developing a reliable technology for spreading them in space is a highly complex engineering task. The Japanese test is one of the first attempts to test the mechanics of unfurling a solar sail in space. Other efforts in the past have met with mixed results. In the 1993 Znamya-2 experiment, Russian cosmonauts on board the Mir space station observed the successful deployment of a solar sail from an unmanned Progress supply ship. A second Znamya flight in 1999 was not as successful, as the sail unfurled but then became entangled with part of its deployment device. In July 2001 the Planetary Society launched a version of its Cosmos 1 solar sail on a suborbital flight designed to test a new technology for unfurling solar sail blades. Because of a malfunction in the Volna launch vehicle the spacecraft remained attached to the booster and the unfurling experiment never took place. Teams at NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are also at work on their own versions of solar sails. They have conducted ground tests, but do not have flight experiments scheduled as yet. Later this year, The Planetary Society will launch Cosmos 1, the first operational solar sail spacecraft. The goal is to fly the first controlled solar sail mission, operating the sail so that the spacecraft's orbit energy is increased. If successful, Cosmos 1 will be the first spacecraft to actually be propelled by solar sailing. |
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