Solar sail with future technology.

Navegar por el espacio en un velero impulsado por la luz del sol, parece una idea secada de una novela de ciencia ficción romántica, pero en realidad sí es posible hace unos días una vela solar con tecnología de próxima generación, conocida como sistema de Vela solar compuesta avanzada de la NASA fue lanzada a bordo de un cohete electrón de la compañía Rocket lab desde el complejo de Lanzamiento 1, en Mahia, Nueva Zelanda.

This technology can advance future space travel and expand our understanding of the Sun and the entire solar system, since cheaper exploration ships can be launched as they do not need fuel to propel them and allow these ships to travel through the solar system. for many more years and this is the key to the issue, solar sails do not use fuel, they use the pressure of sunlight as an impulse, leaning towards or away from the Sun so that the photons, which are the particles of light, bounce back. on the sail and push the spaceship.

But if photons do not have mass, how can they push a candle or anything else, when we go out to the window we do not notice that the sun hits us with light all over our face, well, in reality, it does, but it is an extremely small smack, you would have to be as light and as reflective as a solar sail and be in space to notice the thrust, because although light photons have no mass they do have energy and have something that in mechanics is called momentum , when colliding with an object they transfer some of that momentum to the object creating thrust.

Although it may sound amazing, the first to propose the use of sunlight to travel through space was none other than Johannes Kepler. planets orbit the sun and not the Earth as some flat earthers still claim, can you imagine yourself on a space sailboat in the 17th century.

Various nations are involved in the development of this technology. I highlight, for example, the Japanese Ikaros mission, which is currently the only flight beyond the Earth with a solar sail. It was launched on May 20, 2010, bound for the planet Venus, but The Ikaros was not 100% solar powered, it was more of a combination, since it also had an ion engine, the problem is that there is always some problem, of course what adventure does not have problems and difficulties and the adventure of research well, also has.

The problem in this case is that to achieve the necessary thrust to transport a payload, a large surface area is needed, so huge, ultralight sails would have to be developed, and this is what NASA now wants to test, a feather structure composed of flexible polymers and carbon fiber material that is much stiffer and much lighter than previous feather designs.

When the sail is fully deployed about 1000 km from the earth, it will measure about 80 square meters. We will be able to see that large sail with the naked eye, if the conditions are suitable since it would be as bright as the star Sirius; NASA plans to continue developing this idea and create solar sails of up to 2000 square meters that power ships on trips to planets, asteroids and comets.

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