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NASA's solar sail successfully spreads its wings in space
(www.space.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Oh right, yeah. Hopefully we'll see a higher orbit space station that can do manufacturing like this.
Yeah, we may well end up seeing a lot more use of solar light pressure to orient spacecraft over the coming years, especially deep space probes and higher orbit satellites. Telecom satellites need a lot of power for their transmitters, so they generally have quite large solar arrays, I wouldn't be surprised to see some of those using this method for station keeping. (Though these days they're already using very efficient ion thrusters for station keeping, so they may not really need to use this method)
But while solar sail propulsion takes a lot of very specific design requirements, using solar pressure just for maintaining orientation doesn't actually require any fancy hardware (if you already have solar panels), it's all an entirely software solution. Which means it's always a viable backup plan when hardware failures occur.
Yeah exploring for asteroid mining and the asteroid belt being 2-3 AU from the sun, you have 4 to 9 times less solar pressure. But you could still accelerate closer to the sun and then swing out. I imagine tiny cube sats with cheap solar sails could do much of the work there. Anyway, exciting times!
Well that's a really interesting application though... 9 times less thrust may not actually be a very big deal. A solar sail probe would likely be a lot lighter than a fueled equivalent, so that means you have the payload mass to send more probes on the same launch. And asteroids don't have meaningful amounts of gravity, so you can take as long as you want to get from one to another (you don't need much thrust to overcome their gravity well). So yeah, I think more than likely you could make up for a lack of speed with sheer quantity.