NASA’s next-gen Advanced Composite Solar Sail System that could help revolutionize space travel for generations to come. Put simply, solar sails utilize the pressure of sunlight for propulsion, either angling toward or away from the Sun so that photons bounce off the reflective sail to boost a spacecraft.
This form of propulsion eliminates the heavy systems of today and could enable longer duration as well as lower-cost missions. The Advanced Composite Solar Sail System consists of a twelve-unit (12U) CubeSat built by NanoAvionics to test a new composite boom made from flexible polymer, along with carbon fiber materials that are stiffer and lighter than previous designs. Engineers aim to successfully demonstrate new boom deployment, but after deployment, the team also hopes to prove the sail’s performance. Once reaching its Sun-synchronous orbit, about 600 miles above Earth, the spacecraft will start unfurling its composite booms, which span the diagonals of the polymer sail.
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Seven meters of the deployable booms can roll up into a shape that fits in your hand. The hope is that the new technologies verified on this spacecraft will inspire others to use them in ways we haven’t even considered,” said Alan Rhodes, the mission’s lead systems engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
