Solar Sails Sail into Trouble
If you’ve been following the news (and I’m sorry that I’ve been too busy to post about it the last few days!) then you might have heard that a new spacecraft designed to test solar sails was set to launch today. Fired from a Russian submarine (which had to get special permission to fire a missile that could potentially have contained a warhead, but in fact contained the solar sail set up!) it cost just $4 million (U.S.) and was to be the first test of the actual propulsion of the solar sails. The idea is that the gentle push of sunlight as it bounces of an object, completely negligible to us here on Earth, would slowly accelerate a light enough object with a large area.
Unfortunately, it seems things are not going well - the team has lost contact with the spacecraft. The Cosmos 1 Weblog, but Project Operations Assistant Emily Lakdawalla is a fascinating insight into what it must be like being involved in an operation such as this. I strongly recommend reading from the bottom up (in chronological order) so you can see their thought process and the chain of events. There’s a slow but depressing descent from the optimistic “but that’s not entirely unexpected” to “We don’t know.”
Earlier reports basically said that they were expecting to fail. Well, maybe not quite that (because if so, why waste the money?!) but they did say “It will be a not-surprising failure if it doesn’t [succeed].” It’s depressing, though not nearly so much as the various craft lost to the Martians on Mars. It’s not completely over yet, but I’d say it’s pretty close. Watch the above blog for more details.