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NASA's solar sail successfully spreads its wings in space (www.space.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19354798

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

The solar sail reflects light instead of absorbing it so you get to double dip on photon momentum.

And sure, you can steer with the laser I suppose, but with that kind of super weak deltaV, you’re not going to be exactly doing donuts in the solar system.

Even the massive solar sail only imparts a super small amount of force. It’s only useful because it does so for free over a long period of time with no air resistance.

You’d be better off using a conventional thruster to do whatever steering you needed to do before letting the sail take over. It’s not like you need to steer around any obstacles.