Solar sails

Solar sails is a technology that can be common to any technological civilization in the Cosmos, in the same way that ancient humans from different continents could come to the conclusion that if wood floats with it, boats can be built, any technological civilization You may have realized that taking advantage of the push that photons give you can travel through the cosmos.

If this is the case, solar sails would be the most abundant, largest and most expendable structure of a spacecraft, since if it breaks they are not lost they can be easily replaced by another, this solar sail thing was born in the 80s of the Last century within the planetary society founded in 1980 by three scientists, one of them Carl Sagan, these scientists dreamed of creating space ships to explore the planets of the solar system and travel to the worlds of other stars.

The objective would be to build a ship equipped with a solar sail, although the more correct term would be a light sail, since the principle of solar sails is based on the fact that although the photon of light has no mass, the photon has momentum, a momentum that can be transferred to other objects, this impulse is minuscule if we sunbathe we do not feel pushed on the beach by its rays or if we turn on a lamp on the roof we do not notice a pressure on our head.

It is a tiny boost, but on a large scale it is an effect that can be felt, which is why solar sails have to cover a large area to be able to move even a small probe of a few kilograms.

Another problem is that the material of the sail itself is also heavy, so researchers experiment with materials that are as light as possible, but once we have a large light sail and a ship with all the components reduced to a minimum we can launch it to explore the solar system. calmly, at first we would go very slowly, but the important thing is that the impulse of light is constant So with time we would pick up speed and in several months we could be traveling faster than spacecraft powered by chemical fuel and best of all It is that it would be free, because the push that the sun gives us is free and we would not have to carry heavy and expensive tanks of chemical fuel.

But if the ship is pushed by sunlight, how would we go about getting back to earth or how would we go about traveling to Venus which is about the Sun from us, solar sails can be made maneuverable so that they can be oriented just like a ship's sail, in the case of wanting to travel towards the sun, for example if we want to visit Venus, the trick is to orient the sail so that the force vector is oriented behind the line of the sun, which decreases the orbital energy and also the angular momentum and this causes the orbital speed to decrease and thus the ship falls towards the Sun, in this case it is sunlight that reduces the speed and the gravity of the sun that attracts the ship.

Although it may seem like science fiction, the most beautiful thing in this whole story is something that can now be done, it is not something from the future, in fact it is almost something from the past, on May 21, 2010, the Japanese space agency launched the first interplanetary probe propelled with a solar sail, they were icaros and their destination was precisely Venus over which it passed some 80,800 kilometers away on December 8, 2010.

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