SOLAR SAILING
 -----------
 John Pazmino
 NYSkies Astronomy Inc
 nyskies@nyskies.org
 www.nyskies.org
 2010 July 24
Introduction
 ----------
    On 2010 July 20-22 NYC Technical College (City Tech) hosted the 
2nd International Symposium on Solar Sailing. Delegates from at least 
14 countries convened at the college to review and preview the use of 
sails for space travel. 
    The conference was a bit expensive for casual attendance but it 
offered a free public lecture/panel on Wednesday 21 July. It featured 
several delegates giving short summaries of their work. The lecture 
opened at 18h EDST and ran thru a little before 20h. 
    The highlight speaker was Dr Kawaguchi of Japan. He discussed and 
showed his IKAROS spaceprobe, the first ever true solar sail 
experiment. It's on its way to Venus and then heliocentric orbit and 
already set out its sail. A week or so before the lecture it recorded 
positive acceleration of the sail due to incident sunlight. 
    After the talks was a panel of all of the speakers to field 
questions from the floor and a general dialog about solar sailing.. 
City Tech
 -------
    City Tech is a component of the City University of New York but is 
its curriculum is mostly for vocational and technical fields. In its 
own circle, City Tech is well respected and turns out career-worthy 
graduates. 
    It is on Jay Street, a main north-south street in Boro Hall and 
Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn. It's reached by buses and subways working 
these two districts. I arrived at the college by the IND 6th Av line
at its Jay Sy-Boro Hall station. From there it was a 200 meter walk 
north straight on Jay St. 
    It mainly offers two-year degrees. With care in choosing courses a 
student obtains an easy transfer to a four-year college for the 
bachelor's degree. 
    The college works closely with Polytechnic University, now part of 
New York University, a blocks south nearer to Boro Hall. It has career 
paths with several of the companies in MetroTech, a corporate campus 
also near Boro Hall. 
    City Tech is deceiving small. It has a couple halls, newly built 
for it or renovated in older buildings. It has no campus in the normal 
sense, which is a common feature in many other City University units. 
Yet it enrolls some 15,000 students!  
Registration
 ----------
    For some peculiar reason the lecture required sign up by getting a 
ticket from Brown Paper Ticket, a website selling theater tickets. The 
various notices for the lecture gave confusing instructions for 
registering. Detective work and flat-out inquiries got most attendees 
to the right place. 
    There was no cost for the solar sail talk but you had to step thru 
all the registration items, with the price entered as '$ 0'. There is 
no actual ticket issued.. You were placed on a list to be checked off 
upon entry. I printed out the completion page. just in case there was 
a dispute. 
    Fellow NYSkier Julius Chini, of New York Institute of Technology, 
also wanted to attend. With his computer acting up, he asked me to cut 
a ticket for him. I did and then delivered a printout to his college 
office a day before the symposium. 
    After going thru all of this fuss, there was NO ONE AT ALL 
collecting tickets or checking lists at the lecture hall! Any one 
could walk in off of the street with no challenge. In fact, in the 
general public notice there was no mention of sign up for the meeting. 
Lecture hall 
 ---------- 
    I arrived at about 17:45, reaching the street at Jay-St station. 
After entering the College I asked for the 'solar sail talk'. I was 
pointed thru certain doors to the Atrium Theater. 
    A little ways inside I came to a large arena, lighted by skylight 
and ringed by sofas. The sofas had 'reserved' signs on them. At one 
side was a decorated table with front-facing seating. 
    This must be the 'atrium' theater? 
    I sat in a sofa for a couple minutes. No one else came along and 
no crew attended the place. An inquiry at a nearby office got me to 
the proper room. This was a regular auditorium having some 100 seats 
and nothing at all associated with 'atrium'. 
    The room was pleasantly cool and remained so for the entire 
meeting. The lectern was lighted by spotlamps. Their range cones 
spilled partly onto the projection screen but did not overly obscure 
pictures shown on it. Area lighting at first was dismally dim. I could 
not read handouts or sign an attendance sheet in the low light. Only 
at the end, during the panel, were ceiling lighting turned on. 
    A few audience were in seats, a few chatted around the walls, crew 
was fiddling with the AV gear. I sat with Prof Chini. I noticed no one 
else from local spacefaring groups. 
    At 18:00 the meeting was opened by Louis Friedman, Planetary 
Society. The Society cosponsored the conference and has a sail project 
in design stage, Cosmos-1. Other speakers were Junichiro Kawaguchi, 
Japan space agency; Malcolm Mcdonals, University of Strathclyde, UK; 
Les Johnson, NASA Marshall SFC; and Roman Kezerashvili, City Tech. 
    There were barely 30 in the audience! The attendees spread out, 
like repellent electric charges, thruout the seats, leaving large 
holes between them. I was a bit surprised, being that this lecture was 
part of the overall conference. Be as it may, this number remained 
stable thruout the entire procedings, with occasional exchange of 
people as some left early and others came late.
    Later in the week I learned there was a bus tour of the City for 
the delegates concurrent with the symposium. I agree that most 
delegates wanted this chance to see the City, a unique feature of the 
meeting, and catch up on the symposium from colleagues later. 
Solar sailing
 -----------
    I give here a blended summary of the talks with some comments from 
other associates regarding solar sails. 
    A solar sail is a large thin light-weight sheet attached to a 
spacecraft. It collects sunlight, which imports its momentum to the 
sail and craft. The pressure comes from the photons as an effect of 
electromagnetic radiation. 
    By altering the area, reflectance, angle of the sail, the 
direction and strength of the photon thrust can be adjusted to 
manoeuver the spacecraft. It replaces rockets or jets, saving the 
mass, complexity, safety hazard, finite supply of fuel. 
    As you may imagine, the pressure of sunlight is minuscule. That's 
why it is common to associate solar sails with humongous sizes, slow 
accelerations, long duration flights. Yet such sails are practical for 
other simpler spacefaring functions, as illustrated in this meeting 
and elsewhere. 
    The sail and its rigging are folded up delicately inside the 
spacecraft and unfurled when it gets beyond the atmosphere. Because it 
must face the Sun a solar sail can have embedded or attached solar 
cells for electric power. If the craft returns to Earth, the sail can 
be discarded for destructive decay in the atmosphere. 
Radiation
 ------- 
    Electromagnetic radiation, within which light is merely one range 
of wavelength, conveys energy from source to target. This is the 
energy that activates the target such as a radio, signal, television, 
telephone. Remote control by radio waves was first demonstrated in 
1898 in New York by Tesla. He manipulated a motorized boat in a tub of 
water by working a radio console at one side. 
    Communication by radio was also demonstrated by Telsa and by 
Marconi in 1899 to inaugurate the electromagnetic industry on Earth. 
The amount of energy, the field strength, is usually very weak. 
    When the wave hits a surface it imparts its energy to it, usually 
as heat, agitation of the molecules in the surface. Some of this 
energy is captured internally by the surface, as an antenna, to drive 
the electronic device. 
    An object standing in sunlight gets amazingly hot for this reason. 
Solar heating is now commonly used in winter, displacing fuel-burning 
heaters, by shining thru sunward-facing windows. 
    In the transfer of energy from the wave to the target, a pressure 
is applied. The amount of this pressure varies with the reflectance of 
the target thru a 2:1 swing. A fully reflective target, a mirror, 
receives twice the pressure as a fully absorbing target. 
    This is why an object of varied colors suffers different heating 
from part to part. Parts of light color are (a bit) cooler than those 
of dark color. This is why in tropical or torrid countries houses tend 
to be painted white or pastel colors. 
Pressure 
 ------
    The pressure produced by impingent radiation is surprisingly 
simple: 
    (pressure) = (irradiation)/(lightspeed), absorbing target 
    (pressure) = (2)*(irradiation)/(lightspeed), reflecting target 
    Since no real target is totally reflecting or absorbing, the 
realized pressure is somewhere between these extremes. Most solar 
sails are very reflective, like by metal coatings, to maximize the 
pressure. This tactic also lessens somewhat the required area and mass 
to be mounted on the spacecraft. 
    By applying dimensional analysis, the formula is: 
    [newton/meter2] = [watt/maters2]/[meter/second]
                    = [joule/second.meter2]/[meter/second] 
                    = [joule/meter2]/[meter], see below 
                    = [newton.meter/meter2]/[meter] 
                    = [newton/meter2] 
 
    The line 'see below' is a diversion. In engineering, pressure is 
often associated with energy. When a high-pressure tank bursts, it 
releases high energy suddenly. The [joule/meter2]/[meter] is collapsed 
to [joule/meter3], an energy density. A tank under high pressure is 
also a tank laden with dense energy. If this is released suddenly, in 
a blowout, the consequences are similar to a chemical bomb. 
    Applying numbers to the pressure formula, based on the insolation 
from sunlight at the Earth, we obtain: 
 
    (pressure) = (2)*(irradiation)/(lightspeed), reflecting target 
               = (2)*(1.40 kW/m2)/(3e5 km/s) 
                 (9.33e-6 N/m2) 
                 (9.33 uN/m2) 
The 'u' is the ASCII substitute for Greek mu, the symbol for 'micro-'. 
    This 9.33 micronewton/meter2 IS TINY. Compared to Earth's 
atmosphere pressure at sealevel, it's about 9e-11 atmospheres. I 
believe this a LESS than the pressure of the evanescent atmosphere on 
the Moon! 
Solar system
 ----------
    The above calcs are for a sail at Earth distance from the Sun. 
Since irradiation from the Sun follows the inverse-square rule, so 
does the realized pressure on the sail. For a given distance from the 
Sun in AU, where 1AU is the mean Earth-Sun distance, we have: 
    (pressure at x AU) = (9.33 uN/m2)*(1/x)^2 
For a sail in orbit of Mercury, 0.37AU from Sum, the pressure is 
    (pressure at 0.37AU) = (9.33 uN/m2)*(1/x)^2 
                         = (9.33 uN/m2)*(1/(0.37))^2 
                         = (9.33 uN/m2)*(2.70)^2 
                         = (9.33 uN/m2)*(7.30) 
                         = (68.15 uN/m2) 
    This is still a very small thrust. For targets farther away than 
Earth, the pressure becomes vanishingly small and likely not all that 
useful for spacecraft operation. A sail near Saturn, about 10AU from 
Sun, receives a pressure of only about 0.093 uN/m2. 
Spectrum
 ------ 
    For a good first approximation, the Sun is a blackbody radiator 
running at 6,000K. At this temperature most of the emitted energy 
is within the optical or visual band of the spectrum. Little emits in 
the infrared or ultraviolet. 
    While the maximum wavelength of emission is around 550nm, with the 
energy output falling off toward the longer and shorter wavelengths, 
for solar sail work, we allow the full spectrum to fall on the sail. 
There is no attempt to filter or other wise modify the spectrum of the 
sunlight impinging on the sail. 
    The total energy received from the Sun at 1AU is quite 1,400 
watt/meter2, a figure that varies only mildly with the cycle of 
sunspots. It also is stable secularly because the Sun is a main 
sequence star, generating its output by the hydrogen-burning process. 
This will last for the next several billion years. 
    Note well that this value is substantially greater than that used 
for solar power on Earth. Our air diverts about 20% of the sunlight to 
make the blue sky and heat the air itself. This is what drives weather 
circulation around the world. 
    What's left as direct beams from the solar disc is at most 1,120 
watt/meter2. And this is for a Sun in the zenith shining on horizontal 
plates. It also neglects removal of energy by cloud and water vapor. 
For practical purposes, 1,000 watt/meter2 is the insolation for 
terrestrial power from the Sun. 
Frontal area
 ----------
    The area in the above and all other sail calculations is the area 
faced toward the Sun. This is independent of the angle or texture of 
relief or shape of the sail. It's the cross section of the sunlight 
beam that completely fills the sail to its perimeter. 
    Altering this area alters the thrust, the 'area' part of the force 
formula. There are several ways to do this, only one of which was ever 
employed. This method is the tilt or angle method. the entire sail as 
a single unit (the usual construction) is turned more or less toward 
the Sun. 
    The frontal area is the entire faceon area times the cosine of the 
angle. Zero degree is faceon; 90, edgeon. This cites the angle between 
the incident sunlight and the normal to the surface. Some authors go 
by the plane with zero degree as edgeon and 90 as faceon. This flips 
the trig function to the sine. Read the author's explanation 
carefully! 
    An other way, so far only proposed, is to make the sail in pleats 
or folds. Spreading them out exposes more area while collapsing them 
reduces the area. An other idea is to warp the sail to curl it into a 
smaller area or flatten it to the maximum area. Yet an other is to 
make the sail with flaps, vanes, louvers. Opening or closing these 
varies the frontal area. 
Sail geometry 
 ----------- 
    The size and shape of a solar sail is strongly based on the means 
of putting it out from its stowage. The cheapest and simplest way is 
by spinning the spacecraft and letting centrifugal force pull out the 
sail. Springs in the rigging pop open the sheet and tension it into 
final shape. The details are crucial, Every component must work just 
right else the sail is deployed incompletely. It may then be useless 
for the mission. 
    In other experiments with tethers or daughter modules, failures 
are almost expected. The wire jams or breaks, the module is oriented 
wrongly, some function doesn't work, and so on. Things work very 
differently in space than on earth. A mechanism that does its thing 
perfectly on a lab bench can go terribly wrong in outer space. 
    Most sail proposals, and that of IKAROS, are square, consisting of 
four triangular sheets meeting at the central fuselage. Spars or 
struts of strong low-mass material spring out along the sides of the 
triangles, the diagonal of the square, to hold the sheets in place. 
    This design is often a rigid one, where there is no intent to 
reshape the sheets to change area or angle. These factors are altered 
by moving the entire spacecraft. Adding shaping capability means a 
much more complex system with more things to go wrong. 
    An other common plan is a disc supported by a peripheral ring that 
springs open, like a folding beach hat. Struts attach the sail to the 
craft at the center of the ring. 
    A third is the blade, petal, or paddle sail. These look like the 
usual array of solar electric panels, rectangles on spars outward from 
the fuselage. These are mounted on rotating bases for area and nagle 
adjustment. 
    A pretty, but not yet practical, scheme is the daisy of many 
blades in a circular pattern around the fuselage. Each is on a 
dirigible base for angle and area adjustment but together they form a 
close fitting round frontal area.   
    The antagonism is to have a large light-weight sail with as fool-
proof a deploying and mounting mechanism as possible. Only with 
advanced robotics or a human EVA can a scrambled sail be fixed. 
Reflectance 
 --------- 
    The standard sails call for a reflective surface to get the most 
pressure, as explained above. That's why metallic membranes are so 
often mentioned. An other reason is that these sheets can be made 
extremely thin, mere microns, to reduce the sail mass. 
    Such a sail has a fixed reflectance with no means of altering it. 
The only credible, and elegant!, reflectance-changing mechanism is 
that on IKAROS. It uses LCDs of variable darkness according as signal 
is applied to them. 
Durability
 --------
    Like anything else in longterm space setting, a solar sail can 
suffer degradation from the ambient conditions. Radiation of certain 
wavelengths, meteoroids, cosmic and solar wind, space junk can injure 
the sail. There's so far no long-endurance experience with sails, but 
that with other spaceprobes systems indicate that the danger of fatal 
damage may be overstated. 
    Yes, a large rock or debris can crash thru the sail and rip it out 
of service. But such episodes are rare and does not demand fortifying 
a sail against them. The effort would be too costly in mass and 
reliability. 
    Deterioration by sputtering, punctures, spalling of the coating 
will take longer than the mission lifespan. 
    The greatest hazard is the manipulation of the sail. The mount 
with motors, tethers, gears can fail just as easily and spontaneously 
as any other spacecraft device. When that happens the sail no longer 
can guide the craft. Its trajectory is then biased by the now fixed 
attitude of the sail or the sail has to be jettisoned as space junk. 
Solar wind 
 --------
    Besides electromagnetic radiation, the Sun pours out a continuous 
wind or rain of protons and electrons. Layfolk hear of this 'solar 
wind' because it louses up electric power, telcomms, data links, 
signal and control, timing, navigation. In fact, any thing that works 
thru electromagnetism can be screwed up by impact of the solar wind. 
    Happily Earth's own magnetic field shields us from the constant 
bombardment of these particles. This shield is lacking on, as example, 
the Moon. When the particles enter our magnetic field they are 
diverted along the field lines of force away from the ground. In 
extreme cases, during a solar storm, the particles do penetrate to the 
lower atmosphere to cause, among other effects, the aurorae polares. 
    Can't the solar sail be propelled by the solar wind? 
    In principle, yes. In reality, no. 
    The pressure, the sum of the impacts of each proton and electron, 
is 1/1000 of the radiation pressure, about 9 nanonewtons/meter2. For 
solar sail work, we ignore the contribution of the solar rain. 
    For other aspects of satellite design, we MUST mind the solar 
wind. The plasma stream can -- and repeatedly does! -- zap onboard 
electronics. The SOHO probe, specially hardened against solar wind, 
is decked once in a while by a strong blast of wind and is out of 
action for hours or days. The spring 2010 incident with the Galaxy-11 
telcomms satellite may have been caused by a solar wind zapping. 
Other light source 
 ----------------
    One futuerist plan is to aim Earth or Moon based lasers at a solar 
sail to augment sunlight. The sunlight and laser attack the sail from 
different angles, allowing greater flexibility to govern the 
spaceprobe's trajectory. 
    This is not yet feasible but laser apparatus is improving rapidly, 
mostly from military work. It will take an ordinary military-grade 
laser to put a spot of light equal to or stronger than sunlight on a 
distant solar sail. 
    The laser beam is collimated and weakens with a fractional power 
of distance. It should be possible to operate a solar sail in the 
outer solar system where sunlight is too weak. The aim may be as 
accurate as for narrow-beam radio transmission. 
    Pulsing or varying its strength offers ability to finely adjust 
the craft's flight path. The laser wavelength can be optimized for the 
reflective properties of the sail material. 
    The use of lasers brings up the possibility of waypoints with 
stations like asteroids or planetary moons. When a solar sail craft 
comes nearby, it can call on the laser to give it a trajectory 
correction. With such facilities, a solar sail is no longer stricta 
mente 'solar' but a photon sail propelled by artificial illumination. 
    So far no serious proposal for a laser-augmented sail project is 
in sight. In theory IKAROS can receive a military laser beam but japan 
didn't ay anything about that. Planetary Society's Cosmos-1 is pura 
mente a passive sunlight experiment. 
So what?
 ------
    Believe or not, a form of solar sailing was in use for many years 
in space exploration! Spaceprobes sport solar electric power plates, 
that catch sunlight to make electric for the craft. The usual 
arrangement is a set of blades or panels attached radially from the 
fuselage.
    They make electric by facing toward the Sun for maximum frontal 
area. This requires that the probe change orientation or that the 
panels be on dirigible mounts. The radiation pressure on the solar 
blades is enough to be measured and it must be accounted for in 
keeping the craft on its trajectory. In this case the solar pressure 
is compensated by thrusters as a nuisance force. 
    On the other hand, it can be an extra force to exploit in running 
the mission. A recent example is the MESSENGER probe on its way to 
Mercury. MESSENGER made several swingbys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury. 
In each case its trajectory had to be adjusted delicately to aim at 
the sweet spot for the swingby so the probe leaves the planet on a 
correct path for the next phase of its travel. 
    MESSENGER has jets for manoeuvering it but in a couple instances, 
when it was close to the Sun and receiving an increased insolation, 
the solar panels were used as sails. With abundant sunlight, the 
precise facing of the panels for electric wasn't critical. The panels 
were angled to create the right direction and strength of sunlight 
thrust to adjust the trajectory. 
    In other cases the fuselage of the probe was the sail. Being 
painted or covered with material of various reflectances, turning the 
craft this way or that alters the sunlight pressure between the two 
extremes. This extra pressure can adjust the orbit to save use of 
onboard fuel-burning thruster. 
    What is new now is that there's a spacecraft on its way to Venus 
with a dedicated solar sail. What's more, so far as at mid July 2010 
in time for the City Tech symposium, the effing thing works as 
planned. I describe this project below. 
Modifying orbits 
 --------------
    The practical way to employ a solar sail is to modify the 
trajectory of a spaceprobe in freefall under gravity. The main motion 
is imparted by the rocket that placed the craft in orbit around the 
Sun. The sail does not and can not do this. The sail isn't opened 
until after the craft is on its way to the target by rocket 
propulsion. 
    Take the case of a solar orbit near Earth for geophysical studies. 
The probe is in the orbit and then opens up its sail. If the sail is 
turned edgeon to the Sun, so it looks like a line from the Sun's eye, 
there is no pressure and the sail has no effect on the probe's path 
    If the sail is broadside to the Sun, to expose its full area, the 
maximum force is delivered to the craft. The craft is pushed outward 
to an orbit farther from the Sun. This is like aiming a thruster at 
the Sun with reaction radially away from it. 
    In reality, this force opposes the inward pull of solar gravity, 
leaving on the craft a weakened radial force to let it migrate to a 
higher orbit. 
    The diagram here shows the two extreme orientations. The 
spacecraft 'O' is running left to right while sunlight flows upward 
across it. The sail '-, |' is edgeon for the no-thrust running and 
faceon for the maximum thrust. 
                            /|\ 
                             |          |   
          O                  |          | 
     -----+-----             |          +O     ---------------> 
                             |          |      craft trajectory 
       max thrust            |          | 
                             |      no thrust 
                    flow of sunlight 
    A more plausible orientation is shown below. The craft is running 
left to right while sunlight flows upward across it. The frontal area 
is less than full so the total force is less than the maximum. In 
addition, the force is split into two components, one normal to the 
sail to deliver the thrust and one in the surface that does nothing. 
    The amount of the normal component is a cosine function of the 
angle between the sail and sunlight. Here authors differ. Some treat 
the angle between the sunlight and normal of the sail, after standard 
math practice. Others measure from the plane itself.
    Both are correct but you must read the author's explanation 
carefully. Be wary! Some authors aren't clear which they are using and 
their formula can be misapplied elsewhere.  
    In the left scene below the sail faces partially rearward. The 
force on the sail is a push, relative to the probe's motion. Just like 
by a chemical jet the craft speeds up and migrates to a higher, 
farther, orbit. 
    To slow down the craft and let it settle to a closer orbit, the 
sail is angled forward like in the right scene. The push now opposes 
the craft's motion like a retrojet. 
           \                                        / 
             \  O              /|\           O    / 
               +                |              +     ---------------->  
                 \              |            /       craft trajectory 
                   \            |          / 
                                | 
      thrust speeds craft       |    thrust slows craft 
                                | 
                         flux of sunlight 
 
    This satisfies the objection sometimes raised that solar sails can 
only move a spaceship away from the Sun and not toward it. The flaw is 
that the craft is always falling thru the Sun's gravity field and will 
return if slowed down by any means, sail, rocket, whatever. 
    The direction and strength of the sail force is quite flexible, 
limited only by the mechanics of the rigging. The more freedom to 
adjust the sail, the more complex is the rigging and more ways there 
are for mishaps. The mission planner must balance the two factors. 
    On the other hand, the sail can help with orbit alterations that 
other wise require major rocket costs, like change of plane. Angling 
the sail 'down' or 'up' relative to the axes of the craft can induce a 
swerve out of the orbit plane. It takes time, weeks to months, but it 
may be more effective than an onboard rocket. 
IKAROS 
 ----
    There were many proposals for solar sail projects since the 1970s, 
when they were recovered from calcs by Lebedev of Russia in 1901[!]. 
They were included in space travel fiction since at least the 1960s 
but there was no actual successful sail project fielded in space until 
2010. 
    Planetary Society tried twice to send a small sail into Earth 
orbit in the mid 2000s. Both failed due to launch calamities. A third 
attempt is in the works, described by Friedman at this lecture. It, 
Cosmos-1, is seeking to be a piggyback payload aboard some upcoming 
opportune launch to put it at least 800km elevation. 
    This gets it above the bulk of atmosphere where air drag will not 
spoil the sail's function. The idea is to use the sail to raise the 
probe's orbit to some higher level. It wasn't clear if this test is 
really needed now in light of the wonderful test made by IKAROS only a 
week before the symposium. 
    There few of these in the pipeline in the next few years. The 
majority of launches are to low Earth orbit of only a couple hundred 
kilometer elevation or to geostationary orbit. During the dwell time 
Society is refining the design and construction of the probe. 
    Dr Kawaguchi stole the lecture with his pictures and videos of the 
IKAROS mission. For some of us, it was watching history in the making, 
a genuine placement of a functioning solar sail in space and its 
operation to modify a spacecraft's flight path. 
    IKAROS is a Japan project to test solar sails on a real mission. 
It was a secondary package along with a conventional probe to visit 
Venus. It launched in May 2010 and entered interplanetary trajectory 
in June. 
    The sail, 200m2 in a square shape, is the main thrusting unit on 
IKAROS. The sail was packed up on the outside of the fuselage and 
deployed by spin ejection. 
    Two daughter craft, released before the sail was opened, are 
cameras to monitor and document the sail. Kawaguchi showed their views 
of the sail opening up slowly and deliberately and perfectly to its 
full extent. 
    Dr Kawaguchi was as proud as a peacock to note that on July 9 
IKAROS realized a significant acceleration of speed from the sail! The 
thrust was only 1.1mN, precisa mente the amount expected for the 
frontal area and solar distance on that date. 
    The resulting acceleration was detected by Doppler shift of the 
radio comms from the probe. While this is for only the line-of-sight 
component, the 3D acceleration vector had exactly this component as 
actually measured. 
    IKAROS will fly by Venus in December 2010 and then stay in 
heliocentric orbit for the next three years. The mission plays with 
sail operations until then. 
    A corollary idea, mentioned at this lecture by Dr Kezerashvili, is 
to wander close to the Sun, in its strongest gravity field, to test 
Einstein curvature of spacetime. The sail-propelled craft can make the 
delicate course adjustments by which to assay the Einstein effects. 
IKAROS itself isn't up to this level of experiment bt it's a viable 
purpose for a future mission. 
Special features 
 --------------
    The IKAROS sail has two interesting features that space fans so 
far didn't catch on to. One is the builtin solar electric cells. They 
are a square band about halfway out from the center of the sail. They 
power the craft since they have to, with the sail, face the Sun. 
    This feature was proposed for other projects but never actualized 
until now. One problem was developing solar cells thin and light 
enough to incorporate into the sail. 
    The other is the way the sail changes reflectance. In addition to 
shifting the angle of incidence of sunlight, there is a band along the 
outer edge of the sail of liquid crystal cells. These, like those on 
an electronic digital display, are light or dark according as signal 
is applied to them. 
    By darkening certain ones of the cells, the sail along this band, 
loses reflectance and weakens thrust. The pattern of darkening is 
govermed by the signal profile, just like the numbers on an 7-segment 
display. This is truly an innovative method, one that is simple, 
durable, cheap, energy efficient and dead effective. 
Possible missions
 ---------------
    Already solar sails, whether the dedicated one on IKAROS or the 
make-do one on MESSENGER, are showing the feasibility and practicality 
of sails for space missions. They abate the need for fuel-burning 
rockets for moifiying trajectories. 
    This is a task certain to be done on just about any long-distance 
long-duration flight. No one seriously believes a single ballistic 
impulse from Earth will put a spacecraft exactly on target. 
    With the tiny thrust, what kind of payload can you field? Over the 
last decade, particularly since the 21st century opened, robotics and 
sensing technology made immense advances. A module the size of a 
computer system box, considered small in the 1990s, can be fitted into 
a chicken egg today. It uses far less electric, is vastly lighter in 
mass, yet performs the same function as well as or, plausibly, better 
than the old unit. 
    Already the US Army uses remote sensors the size of dice. A 
soldier throws a bunch into a hideout. They relay enemy voice, radio, 
and computer signal to a safe base. Larger modules, lizard size, crawl 
into enemy land and get GPS fixes and operating specs of vehicles and 
machinery. 
    This trend will continue down to the molecular level where already 
crude experiments are underway to cobble molecules into nano-nano 
machines. This is best illustrated in medical fields, where 
microscopic 'machines' can circulate thru your body to keep tabs on 
various functions and relay readings to a medical response facility. 
    It is entirely within prospect that a spaceprobe the capability of 
Cassini -- with a Huygens-like probe to land on Enceladus -- will be 
carried to its nose cone in a shoulder bag. The Einstein test probe 
described above need not be larger or heavier than a bagel. 
    Such miniaturized lo-mass lo-energy probes are the market for 
solar sails. 
Belbruno flight 
 ------------- 
    A sail because it offers only a low-energy propulsion is a perfect 
companion for a Belbruno trajectory. In many cases so far the Belbruno 
path was a rescue operation when conventional rockets failed. The slow 
crawl of Hayabusa from asteroid Itokawa is one example of a Belbruno 
path in a rescue situation. 
    The probe's rocket sprang a leak near the asteroid, losing almost 
all of its fuel. Only a residual amount remained, enough to send the 
probe back to Earth, a four-year journey!, where it delivered up its 
soil sample in June 2010. 
    The first project with a planned Belbruno path was SMART-1, taking 
some 18 months to reach the Moon, rather than the brute-force three 
days. It was a successful flight, costing a small fraction of a 
regular one with a rocket onboard. 
    MESSENGER is also on a Belbruno path, also by design, to Mercury, 
a planet only a few months away by direct heavy-thrusting rocket. It's 
taking five years to get to Mercury. On the way, it did swingbys of 
Mercury, too fast to attempt an orbit, but close enough for some good 
science data collecting. It also got trajectory correction by flying 
by earth and Venus. 
    To supply the tiny pushes needed to ride the subtle wrinkles in 
the gravity fields of the solar system, a solar sail may be a viable 
mechanism. It can be steered far more precisely and delicately than 
jets and consumes no fuel that must otherwise be carried on the ship.
    There is an other interesting idea, best for an inner solar system 
flight. Ion motors have low thrust, like sails, and are powered by 
electric generated from sunlight. If the electric plates are part of a 
sail the two can work in concert to navigate the spaceprobe.
    No combined sail-ion ship is flying yet, but since both methods 
are now proved ones, having an ion motor with the sail can be helpful 
if the craft is near a target's shadow. Inspecting an asteroid or 
moon is a possibility. When the Sun is blocked in shadow, the ion 
motor kicks in. The combo gives a longer lasting ion fuel supply for 
more ambitious manoeuvers. 
    An interesting prospect is for a solar sail to thrust a threat 
asteroid away from Earth. If the threat is recognized long enough in 
advance, like for Apophis, a sail can be mounted on the asteroid to 
apply a continuous thrust, of appropriate strength and direction, to 
alter the orbit away from Earth. The deflection need be only a hundred 
thousand kilometers at Earth, say a third the Earth-Moon distance. 
Agitated agitation 
 ----------------
    Proposing to whoosk across the solar system or to other stars by 
sails does have a giggle factor. One prime reason is the exaggerated 
promotion by space fans and futurists. You see the lavish articles and 
animations of an oceanliner-size spaceship coupled to a Texas-size 
sail zipping by the planets. 
    These fables are issued by some advocates who otherwise are 
respectable authors. They may parrot what some other author says 
without lifting the bonnet. 'Dr So-&-So designed a spaceship that 
eliminates the need for fuel! It runs on free and ever-lasting 
sunlight!' The artwork is equally ridiculous, like a pasteup from a 
country club, gazebo, and planetarium. 
    These writings are often put out to excite the public to space 
exploration. 'Wow! I'll tell Congress to raise my taxes so I can fly 
around space in that spaceship!' If you believe that, I know LOTS of 
places where you can kiss your money good-bye. 
    Not only in internal litterature, like spacefaring newsletters, 
but also at public exhibits I see such promotions. 'This is what our 
Vida Futura County Space Society is pushing for in the US space 
program.'  Will the public reale mente give credence to a booth 
with posters of people lounging before a spaceship window with its 
solar sail billowing outside? 
    There are several reasons for such nonsensical writings and shows. 
I see one as the lack of good science. Oh, the writer may be educated 
but he doesn't apply his learning skills to space agitation. I see 
gaffes like 'There's no weight in outer space, so we can neglect the 
mass of the sail', 'With no friction, all the sail's acceleration goes 
into the spaceship', 'Passengers can hibernate for ten thousand years 
while the ship accelerates to 9/10 speed of light', 'Sunlight is a 
uniform flow over the whole solar system'. 
    One factor often missed out is the Sun's gravity. On a sail there 
are always TWO forces, the outward radiation pressure and the inward 
gravity. Neglecting the gravity leads to erroneous notions of a sail's 
performance. 
    Concepts like pressure, acceleration, photon, energy, radiation, 
mass, force are routinely scrambled in some space litterature. A clear 
understanding of them is absolutely crucial for any proper agitation 
for space programs. The continued use of oldstyle measures -- and not 
progressing to metrics -- adds to the loose thinking. 
    The end result is not a mass public uprising for space exploration 
but a distaste to pay for what appears to be a rocket hobbyist's 
playground. Need less to say, this public reaction drags down, like a 
solar sail in atmosphere, the whole space promotion effort. 
                              
Conclusion 
 --------
    This was a great lecture/panel. Only at the end, during the panel 
when the speakers sat on the edge of the stage (there was no seating 
on the stage) were there some flaky thoughts. These were handily 
offset by sensible questions.
    The diversion of an asteroid was in the questions. So was one 
about the optimum shape of a sail. 
    These were mixed with those about interstellar human flight of 
only a few years duration due to the fantastic speeds built up by 
sunlight. 
    We left the auditorium after Q&A. A table for space travel books 
was almost completely bypassed for poor placement, on the outside of 
the sweep of traffic leaving the auditorium. From there we drifted 
into the torrid evening air and headed home.