NASA plans to build larger solar sails that can generate more thrust. A new unique composite carbon fiber booms, the ACS3 system has the potential to support sails as large as 2,000 square meters, or about 21,500 square feet, or about half the area of a soccer field. The ACS3 system has been in low earth orbit since April, 2024 after being launched by Rocket Labs.
The ACS3 spacecraft deployed its solar power arrays and unfurled its solar sail via four booms that span the diagonals of the square and unspool to reach 23 feet (about 7 meters) in length. The solar sail is fully deployed, and the square-shaped solar sail measures approximately 30 feet (about 9 meters) per side.
The spacecraft took months to reaching its Sun-synchronous orbit, about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) above Earth.
NASA reported on August 29 that they extended the booms, deploying its 80-square-meter (860 square feet) solar sail. They’ll now use the sail to raise and lower the spacecraft’s orbit, learning more about solar sailing.
The spacecraft is a twelve-unit (12U) CubeSat. It was built by NanoAvionics. It is about the size of a microwave oven.
The Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) being launched by NASA has a sail area of approximately 80 square meters (860 square feet). If a 800 by 800 meter (640,000 square meter) solar sail could be made this would provide about 5 Newtons (1.1 lbf) of force at Earth’s distance from the Sun. A 40 meter by 40 meter solar sail (1600 square meters) would have about 400 times less thrust at about 10 millinewtons. A 2400 square meter solar sail would have about 15 millinewtons of thrust. The 80 square meter sail has about 2 millinewtons of thrust.
NASA will have photos of the ACS3 fully deployed sail next week. The spacecraft has four cameras which capture a panoramic view of the reflective sail and supporting composite booms. NASA said that high-resolution imagery from these cameras will be available on Wednesday, Sept. 4.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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[ 640000 m^2 for 1kg mass would require ~1.65yrs towards ~10% of speed of light (on 5m/s²)(?)
1150x1150m would be necessary for leaving Earth gravity (~10N for 1kg) (?)
or a Starship ~300k kg (100t empty, ~200t progressive opportunities) on 10x 640000 m^2 solar powered sails (not interleaving) can accelerate (0.16*10^-3 m/s²) towards additional ~1300m/s (on top of the initial speed) within ~90days (?) ]
Ideally you might “launch” a solar sail from the L-1 to L-5 positions between the Earth and our moon. Gravity from either body would not be a factor. But I haven’t calculated if that would make a solar sail go faster, sooner. (I’m thinking of concentrated/multiple laser emitters as the light energy source). Or we could use a series of lenses to concentrate solar light on a sail (call it “Cheap laser101”) Of course, the sail would have to be made of material that optimizes that more intense light energy, converting it into momentum. Since you don’t want to vaporize your sail. That would be severely anti-climactic…