A research project to develop an original solar sail made it to the last stage of the NASA project. The third phase of the Innovative Advanced Concepts program (NIAC) will enable researchers to continue investigating and creating an innovative, diffractive solar sail for two years and receive a funding amount of $2 million, writes George Dvorsky for Gizmodo. The award could push the concept of a solar sail, an area of space exploration research just a handful of times, into a more significant application.
“As we venture farther out into the cosmos than ever before, we’ll need innovative, cutting-edge technologies to drive our missions,” NASA director Bill Nelson says in a statement. “The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program helps to unlock visionary ideas–like novel solar sails–and bring them closer to reality.”
Similar to how the average sailboat uses the wind to propel itself, solar sails operate by using the force of sunlight to drive themselves across space. If light rays hit the reflective surface, their energy moves forward, allowing the craft to consume fuel. Present refractive solar sails are huge, thin, and usually limited in their travel directions. However, the diffractive solar sail, which utilizes small grates incorporated into thin films, might be more flexible and adaptable. Smaller, more flexible, steerable, and much more maneuverable than an engine-powered vessel.
The idea of a solar sail that diffractively rotates was first chosen to be considered for NIAC Phase I and Phase 2 designation in the year 2019. During the phases, as well as their testing, a group tried out a variety of sail materials as well as developed plans for control and navigation systems for a possible diffractive light sail mission that would be able to orbit the Sun’s poles, the statement states. In both phases, there were tests on space weathering that assessed the sail’s capability to endure the intense ultraviolet light exposure of space, as per a NASA announcement in 2019. In phase 3, scientists will improve the sail’s material and conduct ground tests to prepare for the concept solar mission.
Solar sails have a limited and unremarkable background. The non-profit research organization, The Planetary Society, attempted to launch the Cosmos 1 probe in 2005 to be orbiting around Earth; however, it failed to even make it out of the Earth because of a failure in the rocket. India’s government India has launched smaller solar sails powered missions to serve as components on satellites for communication between 1993 and 2003. The Japanese Exploration Space Agency (JAXA) successfully launched the IKAROS spacecraft, which was equipped using a solar sail in 2010 to examine Venus and the Sun. Since then, NASA and the Planetary Society have successfully launched solar sail-powered craft to low-earth orbit.
“Diffractive solar sailing is a modern take on the decades old vision of lightsails,” declares Amber Dubill, a mechanical engineer at Johns Hopkins University who will take charge of the third phase in the NASA statement. “While this technology can improve a multitude of mission architectures, it is poised to highly impact the heliophysics community’s need for unique solar observation capabilities.”