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True wind (V T) is the same everywhere in the diagram, whereas boat velocity (V B) and apparent wind (V A) vary with point of sail. Forces on sails result from movement of air that interacts with sails and gives them motive power for sailing craft, including sailing ships, sailboats, windsurfers, ice boats, and sail-powered land vehicles.
IKAROS, the first space-probe with a solar sail in flight (artist's depiction), featuring a typical square sail configuration of almost 200 m 2. Solar sails (also known as lightsails, light sails, and photon sails) are a method of spacecraft propulsion using radiation pressure exerted by sunlight on large surfaces.
LightSail 2 with deployed solar sail, 23 July 2019. LightSail 2 (COSPAR 2019-036AC) was a CubeSat fitted with a solar sail the size of a boxing ring, covering 32 m 2 (340 sq ft). The sail captured incoming photons from the Sun, just as a wind sail catches the moving air molecules, to propel the spacecraft. [30]
Force is applied by ion engines fed with material mined from the asteroid itself. In the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds, interstellar commerce depends upon "lighthugger" starships which can accelerate indefinitely at 1 g, with superseded antimatter powered constant acceleration drives. The effects of relativistic travel are an ...
Cosmos 1 was a project by Cosmos Studios and The Planetary Society to test a solar sail in space. As part of the project, an uncrewed solar-sail spacecraft named Cosmos 1 was launched into space at 19:46:09 UTC (15:46:09 EDT) on 21 June 2005 from the submarine Borisoglebsk in the Barents Sea.
NanoSail-D2 was a small satellite built by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and Ames Research Center to study the deployment of a solar sail in space. It was a three-unit CubeSat, measuring 30 cm × 10 cm × 10 cm (11.8 in × 3.9 in × 3.9 in) with a mass of 4 kg (8.8 lb). [3]
Magnetic sail animation. A magnetic sail is a proposed method of spacecraft propulsion where an onboard magnetic field source interacts with a plasma wind (e.g., the solar wind) to form an artificial magnetosphere (similar to Earth's magnetosphere) that acts as a sail, transferring force from the wind to the spacecraft requiring little to no propellant as detailed for each proposed magnetic ...
As of August 2017, NASA confirmed the Sunjammer solar sail project was concluded in 2014 with lessons learned for future space sail projects. [78] The U.K. Cubesail programme will be the first mission to demonstrate solar sailing in low Earth orbit, and the first mission to demonstrate full three-axis attitude control of a solar sail. [79]