Nasa will launch a 13,000 square foot solar sail next year post 2

NASA Will Launch A 13,000-Square-Foot Solar Sail Next Year. NASA’s new heavy lift rocket isn’t the only massive space propulsion system the agency has in the works. The largest solar sail the solar system has ever known is headed to the launchpad in 2014 on a mission that will eventually take it nearly 2 million miles from Earth. Where NanoSail-D’s diminutive sail measured just 100 square feet and Japan’s IKAROS measures something like 2,000 square feet, Sunjammer’s sail possesses a total surface area of nearly 13,000 square feet. Yet collapsed it weighs just 70 pounds and takes up about as much space as a dishwasher, making it easy to stow in the secondary payload bay of a rocket headed to low Earth orbit. The sail will be made of Kapton, a super-thin film developed by DuPont that is used in all kinds of things, from space suits to flexible circuitry. The special layer of Kapton film developed by DuPont along with NASA is just 5 microns thick. Once unfurled, it is light enough that its own weight isn’t a hindrance yet strong enough that it can tow a support module across space using pressure provided by the sun in the form of photons as propellant, much as a maritime sail uses the wind to pull a sailboat across a body of water.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-01/nasa-will-launch-largest-solar-sail-solar-system-has-ever-seen-2014.

Sven Milder