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LarmyOfLone ,

This NASA video is pretty amazing. I was wondering how they did the booms and they are soft carbon fiber tubes rolled up on spools. I was imagining that you could simply spin the sail and use centrifugal force to expand it.

Maybe someone can answer me this: I’ve always wondered if a solar sail can only generate momentum away from the sun or if it can be angled to create momentum in other direction. Since the light is reflected and not absorbed, angling it e.g. 45° you change the “momentum” of the photons. That should also change the momentum impacted on the solar sail and spacecraft. Right?

user1234 ,

I wonder how long it will take to get to Cardassia

HottieAutie ,

SAIL!

fjordbasa ,

My favorite version

DrownedRats ,
@DrownedRats@lemmy.world avatar

Yo ho yo ho a pirates life for me!

reev ,

Ramiel?

moncharleskey ,

So hot right now!

paraphrand , (edited )

I hope it can be sent somewhere neat once they are done testing. But I assume it’s not configured for long range communication.

It would be cool if it could be sent, slowly, to a “nearby” body.

Passerby6497 ,

Iirc, solar sail designs like this can actually go stupid fast when properly propelled by something like a laser array.

booly ,

What’s fun about these is that the mass of the actual vehicle can be much smaller if it doesn’t need to carry rocketry and fuel on board. So even though they’ll never compete with rockets for power (energy used over a specific length of time), starting at a lighter weight and never running out of fuel means that these systems could theoretically exceed the top speeds (relative to the earth) of our fastest rockets, given enough time.

Lemming6969 ,

Just to zoom by the target in 100000 years so quickly no pictures or data can be captured.

Passerby6497 ,

That’s actually not that big of a deal!

Since these craft would be small, they wouldn’t have the power to transmit back to Earth anyway. So with something like this, you would actually want a string of these kind of crafts that you would propel along the same vector so that they could send the data back using each following craft as the next point in the network back to Earth. So each one can take additional pictures to get a resolvable image at the end!

Now, getting them on the same vector is the hard part, since we’re constantly moving through space and won’t have the same launch conditions on subsequent launches, but this is all theoretical at this point anyway.

GreyEyedGhost ,

The scientist Robert L. Forward discussed possible ways to handle this in his novel Rocheworld. The fiction part wasn’t about the light sail, more the general AI, life extension tech, and the aliens.

booly ,

There’s a paper from 1984 that worked out the math for a two-sail system that could get a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, and slow down and end up in that gravity well, with a 41-year mission time. It would do so by discarding a reflector that points backward at the actual payload with its own sail. The paper also proposes a mechanism for a round trip mission, too, using 3 sails.

NotMyOldRedditName , (edited )

Won’t the sail approach the speed of light if it stays on course in line with the sun for an exceptionally long time?

Passerby6497 ,

No, because the solar wind drops off around 100 AU, and the power of the solar wind is going to reduce the farther out you are. These kinds of craft would get much more acceleration from a laser array that can put much more concentrated energy into the sail. But just like the solar wind, it will lose power the farther away from the array it is, along with any kind of intermediary debris attenuating the beam or unfavorable angles between the array and the craft.

So you can get these to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, but I don’t think we’d be able to get anywhere close to c with this kind of a setup.

Thomrade ,

I suppose it can’t build up enough speed by going in direct line out of the solar system as the falloff would mean there’s not enough “runway” so to speak. But I wonder if you could circle the sun and “tack” like a ship does sailing into the wind and build up more momentum that way?

gressen ,

Thankfully for us, the spacecraft that deployed the sail contains four cameras that can capture a panoramic view of both the reflective sail and the accompanying composite booms. The first of the high-resolution imagery is expected to be accessible on Wednesday, Sept. 4.

I can’t wait.

treadful ,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

Though photons don’t have mass, they can force momentum when they hit an object — that’s what a solar sail takes advantage of.

Sounds like a bug.

subignition ,
@subignition@fedia.io avatar

deleted_by_author

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    ricdeh ,
    @ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

    Radiation pressure does not have anything to do with mass-energy equivalence. 1), the energy for this process does not come from the conversion of electric energy into mass, and 2) having a momentum is not a property tied to massive particles. All electromagnetic waves carry momentum according to Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, and its transfer is fully explained by his equations and results from the interaction of the EM wave with matter, i.e., absorption and reflection. Each such interaction will transfer momentum to the massive object. This is classical physics, you don’t need any Einstein relativity to explain electromagnetic phenomena because his theories only become relevant for very massive bodies and their movement, and nuclear reactions.

    subignition , (edited )
    @subignition@fedia.io avatar

    ok, that's quite far over my head but I will take your word for it

    HarmBasket ,

    It’s a feature.

    hsdkfr734r ,

    Witchcraft.

    Vector ,

    Must be a problem with floating point precision.

    MonkderVierte , (edited )

    Yeah, why do masless particles have momentum? And please not because law X says so.

    chuckleslord ,

    In short, even though photons have no mass, they still have momentum proportional to their energy, given by the formula p=E/c. Because photons have no mass, all of the momentum of a photon actually comes from its energy and frequency as described by the Planck-Einstein relation E=hf.

    From here: profoundphysics.com/if-photons-have-no-mass-how-c…

    Essentially, momentum is a function of energy, not mass. It’s just that massive objects have way more momentum than massless ones.

    MonkderVierte , (edited )

    Essentially, momentum is a function of energy, not mass.

    Thanks! That’s the critical piece of information.

    marcos ,

    Because they have mass. They don’t have “mass at rest”, but they are never at rest anyway.

    Do you remember that famous E = mc^2 equation? Everything that has energy has mass.

    MonkderVierte ,

    So photons only have no mass if they don’t move? Do they even exist if they don’t move?

    marcos ,

    Do they even exist if they don’t move?

    No. Or, at least not from our point of view.

    They only exist moving at the speed at light. All particles with no rest mass only exist moving at the speed of light.

    MonkderVierte , (edited )

    So photons do have mass?

    pyre ,

    only as long as they exist

    MonkderVierte ,

    Else they don’t. We are talking quantum here.

    DarkThoughts , (edited )

    So, since you cannot delete mass, do they just endlessly bounce / reflect off when hitting something, like the sail?

    marcos ,

    They can also be created or absorbed into something else. The mass of whatever absorbs them increases, and the mass of whatever is emitting them decreases when they do that.

    The mass of everything is changing all the time. The thing that is constant is the rest mass.

    DarkThoughts ,

    That's how kamehamehas work, right?

    thedeadwalking4242 ,

    Energy is mass

    Semi_Hemi_Demigod ,
    @Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world avatar

    Infinite energy glitch

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