NASA hoists the mainsail. The American space agency continues to innovate and should see the first satellite equipped with a solar sail take off during the night from Wednesday to Thursday (firing window opens at midnight Wednesday evening). The CubeSat will be launched from Mahia, New Zealand, by rocket Electron from the company Rocket Lab.
The objective of the mission is to test the ultralight materials which support the sail and allow its deployment, but also and above all to test the ACS3 technology (Advanced Composite Solar Sail System), which uses sunlight to propel an object through space.
Testing orbit variations
To do this, the satellite will be placed in orbit 1,000 km above the Earth. “The craft must be in a high enough orbit that the weak force of sunlight on the sail – roughly equivalent to the weight of a paperclip in your hand – can compensate for atmospheric drag and gain altitude », Explains NASA.
Around two months after entering orbit, the satellite – the size of “a microwave oven”, specifies the American space agency – will deploy its solar sail of around 80 m², which will test variations for several weeks of orbit “using only the pressure of sunlight on the sail”. Concretely, “the sail points towards the Sun or turns away from it so that the photons [les particules de lumière] bounce on its reflective coating to push the machine,” explains NASA.
“An unlimited source of propulsion”
“The Sun will continue to burn for billions of years, so we have an unlimited source of propulsion,” says Alan Rhodes, the mission’s lead systems engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. Instead of launching massive fuel tanks for future missions, we will be able to launch larger sails that use already available “fuel.” »
The objective of this method is simple: to avoid heavy propulsion systems, which “could allow longer and cheaper missions”, hopes NASA. The American space agency thus wishes to promote access to low-cost missions “to the Moon, Mars, and beyond”.