As NASA continues to push the limits of exploration, a new idea for a solar sail that will be developed for a demonstration mission could take science to new heights.
NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program has selected Diffractive Solar Sailing for Phase III investigation. Phase III strives to deliberately transfer NIAC concepts that have the greatest impact on NASA, other government agencies, or commercial partners.
“As we venture farther out into the cosmos than ever before, we’ll need innovative, cutting-edge technologies to drive our missions,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson remarked.
“The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program helps to unlock visionary ideas – like novel solar sails – and bring them closer to reality.”
Solar sails use the pressure exerted by sunlight to move a vehicle across space, similar to how a sailboat uses the wind to span the ocean. Existing reflective solar sail designs are often quite wide and thin, and they are constrained by the direction of the sun, requiring power-to-navigation compromises.
Small gratings embedded in thin films would be used in diffractive light sails to take advantage of diffraction, a feature of light that causes light to spread out when it passes through a narrow hole. This would allow the spaceship to exploit sunlight more efficiently while maintaining agility.
“Exploring the universe means we need new instruments, new ideas, and new ways of going places,” added Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). “Our goal is to invest in those technologies throughout their lifecycle to support a robust ecosystem of innovation.”
With the new Phase III award, the research team will get $2 million over two years to keep developing technology for a possible future demonstration mission. Amber Dubill of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, is leading the study.
Mike LaPointe, interim program executive for the NIAC program at NASA Headquarters, said, “NIAC allows us to foster some of the most creative technology concepts in aerospace. Our goal is to change the possible, and diffractive solar sailing promises to do just that for a number of exciting new mission applications.”
Diffractive light sailing would expand the capabilities of solar sails beyond what is now possible with missions in development.
Phase III will focus on refining the sail material and conducting ground testing to aid in the development of this solar mission idea. Using traditional spacecraft propulsion, orbits traveling over the Sun’s north and south poles are difficult to achieve.
Lightweight diffractive light sails pushed by sunlight’s steady pressure might be used to launch a constellation of science spacecraft into orbit around the Sun’s poles, advancing our knowledge of the Sun and improving our space weather forecasting skills.
“Diffractive solar sailing is a modern take on the decades old vision of lightsails. While this technology can improve a multitude of mission architectures, it is poised to highly impact the heliophysics community’s need for unique solar observation capabilities,” added Dubill. “With our team’s combined expertise in optics, aerospace, traditional solar sailing, and metamaterials, we hope to allow scientists to see the Sun as never before.”
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