Two solar sails on way next year

One from Japan, one from Interplanetary Society:
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0911/10solarsails/
Is it just me, or does the Japanese one look like the Cursed Flying
Gypsy Scarf from "Drag Me To Hell"?
"Cursed Flying Gypsy Scarf" would make a cool name for a spacecraft. :-)

Pat

noauth wrote:
You're seen it too? I really liked Alison Lohman, she's very pretty.

Reminded me of Renee Zellweger.
Needs two follow-ups; a movie where the same bank forecloses on a old
Rabbi, who promptly makes a Golem, and where they foreclose on the old
Haitian woman and the zombies start to rise.

As for the solar sails, I hope it works this time because it seems like
an excellent way to travel around the solar system and could even be
used for interstellar travel (provided we build a huge laser to propel
it). I wonder how fast it can go (what percentage of light speed) and
what will it cost. We'd need to build a solar powered laser that would
need to operate continously for years, not an easy thing to do IMHO.

Ultimate speed would of course depend on how much power you could hit
the sail with without burning it up.
One really interesting idea is to make the whole sail into something
like a giant printed circuit, so that it could have really formidable
computing power incorporated into it.
The Japanese one appears to have thin-film solar cells on its surface,
and one fun idea would be to make a main sail that would break up into
around a hundred smaller sail units on arrival at its destination.
The U.S. Air Force does have a very high-powered laser out in the desert
at White Sands that can damage satellites in LEO, and although it
obviously couldn't send something on the way to Alpha Centauri, it could
certainly be used to push a solar sail around in orbit if desired:
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/asat/miracl.htm
Then there's the problem of slowing the sail down on arrival at its
target star so it doesn't just go flying through the alien solar system
in a few hours.
One idea to do that had the main sail jettisoning a mini-sail backwards
out of its center and acting like a giant parabolic reflector to reflect
the light hitting it from the propulsion laser back onto the mini-sail
and slowing it down.
Interest in solar sails for space use goes back a lot further than most
people think, and although they didn't work as well as expected, Mariner
3 & 4 used small movable solar paddles at the end of their solar arrays
to help stabilize and position the spacecraft on the way to Mars without
having to use valuable RCS fuel, all the way back in 1964:
http://chapters.marssociety.org/toro...ariner4-LD.jpg
http://chapters.marssociety.org/toro...s/Mariner4.jpg

Pat