NASA is preparing to launch a solar sail Sunjammer

NASA is completing the assembly of a solar sail with an area of ​​about 1200 m ² , which will be put into orbit in 2014. The goal is to demonstrate the possibilities of moving in space using the pressure of sunlight: photons act on a sail with a force of 0.01 Newton . This is not so little: NASA engineers are forced to compensate for the solar pressure when calculating the trajectories of even conventional devices. Light pressure affects them much more than the solar wind (a stream of ionized particles).

The sail is capable of picking up speed to the very borders of the heliosphere, and theoretically it can accelerate to such a speed that, if launched, in 2010 would have overtaken the Voyager-1 probe by 2018. Although it has been in flight since 1977 and recently began to go beyond the heliosphere . Voyager does not have resources for overclocking, but there is enough fuel for heating equipment and radio communications.

Theoretically, the solar sail can still be adjusted with a laser gun from the Earth or the Moon, and then it can even accelerate to 1/10 of the speed of light, according to some engineers.

A solar sail with an area of ​​1200 m ² will become the third solar sail that humanity sends to space, but the largest among all. It is seven times larger than the maximum solar sail, which was sent into space before, and weighs ten times less than it: less than 32 kg. Sail volume of about a cubic meter in the folded state.
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NASA's previous experiment with solar sails was not very successful. For some reason, the material of the sail of the NanoSail-D could not turn around for a month and a half, stuck in the compartment. After this, the bug was removed by itself - and the sail nevertheless turned to its full width, but that case showed how complex and unreliable this design was during deployment.

New NASA solar sail makes of kapton - a thin solid film made by DuPont. The physical properties of the material, see the documentation .

The name Sunjammer was named after the 1964 story by Arthur Clarke of the same name.