NASA funds a NASA project to develop new technologies that allow spacecrafts to fly through the cosmos using solar sails that bend light.
Tuesday’s announcement by the agency was that $2 million will be provided over the next two years for the Diffractive solar sailing project. This project is looking into ways to harness the energy of the sun to power spacecraft and steer them.
This project is part NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program. It funds ideas that could be used for future missions through multiple phases research and testing.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson stated in a statement that “As NASA ventures further out into the cosmos, we’ll require innovative, cutting-edge technologies for our missions.”
NASA has been long interested in solar sail technology. It is a cost-effective alternative for traditional propulsion systems and does not require spacecraft to transport heavy or expensive fuel. Solar sails can be used to power vehicles with an abundant and almost inexhaustible resource: sunlight.
Solar sails are powered by sunlight and use the momentum of the sun to travel through space, much like sailboats do with wind to transport them across the ocean.
Solar sails were largely built using mirror-like surfaces to reflect light particles, known as photons. Photons strike the sail and transfer energy, propelling the spacecraft. This technique is effective but has drawbacks. The vehicle’s mobility is limited due to the direction of the sun.
Diffractive solar sailing project has developed sails that “bend” light to increase power and maneuverability. The sails’ thin material would contain small gratings that capture light and scatter it through the openings. This would enable a vehicle to benefit from momentum from photons, regardless of which direction it is reflected by the sun.
This technology could be used for navigation to places that are difficult to use conventional propulsion systems. It also includes missions to orbit around sun’s poles. Amber Dubill is a mechanical engineer at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland. She is the lead of the project.
Dubill stated that diffractive solar sailing was a modern version of the decades-old vision of lightsails in a statement. We hope that scientists will be able to see the sun with our combined expertise in optics and aerospace.
