NASA’s solar sail was successfully launched, it is called Acs3 and it is a technological demonstrator that will serve to verify the possibility of exploiting the solar wind as a propulsion system. The launch took place from New Zealand with an Electron rocket from the Rocket Lab company; also a South Korean Earth observation satellite on board.
The sail is one of humanity’s oldest means of propulsion and a hi-tech version of it, with a sail capable of being pushed by the flow of particles and energy produced by the Sun, could also prove revolutionary for the future of space exploration. The prototype just launched by NASA called Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, or Acs3, is a small satellite about the size of a microwave oven that contains a large square sail of 9 meters per side folded on itself and which will soon be deployed.
The opening of the canopy, scheduled for the next few weeks, will be the most delicate operation, an operation that should last about 25 minutes and which will be filmed by cameras. Once opened it will cover a surface of around 80 square metres, like an apartment, and will have to ensure the thrust of the satellite which will remain in orbit around the Earth.
Precisely the large size of the sail will allow Acs3 to be easily visible to the naked eye at certain times, during the hours of dawn and dusk. Acs3 is a pilot mission which, if it were to give positive results, could open the doors to increasingly complex missions: in fact, the aim is to create sails of up to 2,000 square meters of surface which could revolutionize exploration missions towards the borders of the Solar System as they it would make it possible to relieve the satellites of a large part of the propellant load and ensure practically unlimited autonomy. An innovative South Korean satellite, NeonSat-1, was also launched together with Acs3, designed to monitor natural disasters and process images directly on board with Artificial Intelligence algorithms.
