NASA Solar Sail Technology Passes Crucial Deployment Test

FEB 12, 2024

In his youth, NASA technologist Les Johnson was riveted by the 1974 novel “The Mote in God’s Eye,” by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, in which an alien spacecraft propelled by solar sails visits humanity. Today, Johnson and a NASA team are preparing to test a similar technology.

NASA continues to unfurl plans for solar sail technology as a promising method of deep space transportation. The agency cleared a key technology milestone in January with the successful deployment of one of four identical solar sail quadrants. The deployment was showcased Jan. 30 at Redwire Corp.’s new facility in Longmont, Colorado. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, leads the solar sail team, comprised of prime contractor Redwire, which developed the deployment mechanisms and the nearly 100-foot-long booms, and subcontractor NeXolve, of Huntsville, which provided the sail membrane. In addition to leading the project, Marshall developed the algorithms needed to control and navigate with the sail when it flies in space.

The sail is a propulsion system powered by sunlight reflecting from the sail, much like a sailboat reflects the wind. While just one quarter of the sail was unfurled in the deployment at Redwire, the complete sail will measure 17,780 square feet when fully deployed, with the thickness less than a human hair at 2 and a half microns. The sail is made of a polymer material coated with aluminum.

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate recently funded the solar sail technology to reach a new technology readiness level, or TRL 6, which means it’s ready for proposals to be flown on science missions.

“This was a major last step on the ground before it’s ready to be proposed for space missions,” Johnson, who has been involved with sail technology at Marshall for about 25 years, said. “What’s next is for scientists to propose the use of solar sails in their missions. We’ve met our goal and demonstrated that we’re ready to be flown.”

A solar sail traveling through deep space provides many potential benefits to missions using the technology because it doesn’t require any fuel, allowing very high propulsive performance with very little mass. This in-space propulsion system is well suited for low-mass missions in novel orbits.

“Once you get away from Earth’s gravity and into space, what is important is efficiency and enough thrust to travel from one position to another,” Johnson said.

Some of the missions of interest using solar sail technology include studying space weather and its effects on the Earth, or for advanced studies of the north and south poles of the Sun. The latter has been limited because the propulsion required to get a spacecraft into a polar orbit around the sun is very high and simply not feasible using most of the propulsion systems available today. Solar sail propulsion is also possible for enhancing future missions to Venus or Mercury, given their closeness to the Sun and the enhanced thrust a solar sail would achieve in the more intense sunlight there.

Moreover, it’s the ultimate green propulsion system, Johnson said – as long as the Sun is shining, the sail will have propulsion. Where the sunlight is less, he envisions a future where lasers could be used to accelerate the solar sails to high speeds, pushing them outside the solar system and beyond, perhaps even to another star. “In the future, we might place big lasers in space that shine their beams on the sails as they depart the solar system, accelerating them to higher and higher speeds, until eventually they are going fast enough to reach another star in a reasonable amount of time.”

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/marshall/nasa-solar-sail-technology-passes-crucial-deployment-test/

U.S. Air Force and Space Force to realign priorities

February 12, 2024

The Department of the Air Force on Feb. 12 unveiled a long-term vision to revamp personnel, operations, and technology efforts with the goal of reshaping the Air Force and newly formed Space Force to concentrate resources squarely on strategic competition with China.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said priorities have to change for the era of great power competition. Service leaders discussed a planned series of initiatives during a panel at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado.

Great power competition generally refers to the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China. This competition encompasses not just military might, but also economic influence and technological advancement. China’s rapid military modernization and assertive foreign policy have placed it at the forefront of this competition, prompting the U.S. to re-evaluate its own strategic posture.

Kendall said the Air Force and Space Force will streamline operations and prioritize critical areas like technology integration, cyber expertise, and software development, all to ensure the Air Force and Space Force are prepared for the complex challenges of the 21st century.

The announcement comes as the Pentagon seeks to move on from legacy structures optimized for counterterrorism operations that dominated since 9/11, and prioritize what it now labels “integrated deterrence” against major rivals like China and Russia.

China’s growing arsenal of long-range missiles and anti-satellite weapons, in particular, threatens American supremacy in areas like air combat and space-enabled intelligence, Kendall has pointed out.

He described the overhaul as a multi-year endeavor but said there is no time to waste. “We are out of time,” Kendall stressed.

Space Force priorities

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman compared the journey ahead for the Space Force to that of a merchant marine that needs to be more like a navy.

Speaking at the AFA conference, Saltzman said the service will introduce training and education programs tailored for an area when space is a contested, not a benign, environment.

In decades past, he said, “the space domain was relatively secure, it was pretty safe. And our job was to provide services to the joint force from that domain … And now we find ourselves in a contested domain. We have to be able to secure the domain so that we can continue to use it and protect the joint force from space-enabled targeting.”

Training programs have to change, said Saltzman. “We have to be able to give our people the training, the education, the experiences that they’re going to need to be successful in the high tech environment that they’re going to face.”

The Space Force will redesign its officer training course so programs for satellite operations, cyber operations and intelligence are not separated into stovepipes. “If the satellite operator doesn’t understand the networks that disseminate the data and doesn’t understand how to provide that data in a threat environment, they are not going to be successful,” said Saltzman.

On the procurement side, there will be greater focus on resiliency against threats, he said. “The merchant marine didn’t have the right equipment to be a navy. Likewise, the systems that we’ve built were designed for a benign environment. We have to redesign our architectures, redesign the systems so they are resilient against an adversary, they have to be resilient under attack.”

‘Space Futures Command’

Saltzman said the Space Force will establish a Space Futures Command as a new field command to develop concepts, conduct experimentation and wargames.

This new command also will look at what technologies should be developed or acquired to defend space, asking questions such as what type of space domain awareness will be needed for cislunar space, beyond Earth’s orbit.

“We are going to build a wargaming center that helps us evaluate technologies and experiment with new technologies,” he said.

https://spacenews.com/u-s-air-force-and-space-force-to-realign-priorities/

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

13 Feb 2024 // 07:57 UTC

The Small Bodies Nomenclature Working Group (WGSBN) – the folks responsible for assigning names to minor planets and comets – last week published a bulletin [PDF] in which it gave 29 small celestial bodies their very own names.

One of the newly named bodies has been given the moniker "Zoozve" and it is remarkable – for several reasons.

One is that it's the first identified quasi-satellite of a major planet.

Zoozve is an asteroid that, as described by its discoverers in a 2005 paper, has an orbit that "takes it quite far afield from Venus – it dives in towards the Sun, passing within the orbit of Mercury, and travelling outwards just beyond the orbit of the Earth at its furthest from the Sun." That path traces a shape that resembles a butterfly shape that comes about because the asteroid and Venus are travelling around the Sun nearly in lock-step.

"This means that VE68 has a very special property as seen from Venus," the paper states. "It appears to travel around the Venusian sky about once every Venus year. If you didn't know that VE68 is really travelling around the Sun, you might declare that Venus has a moon (or satellite) of its own."

The first name given to the object was VE68 and it was later given the designation 2002 VE68.

While the asteroid is the first of its kind to be observed in such an orbit, it's small, poses no danger to Earth, and did not excite the public imagination at the time.

But it did catch the eye of an artist named Alex Foster, who drew it on a poster of the solar system he designed for children and depicted it as a moon of Venus. He also misread the name of the asteroid and turned “2002 VE” into "Zoozve"

As beautifully told by Space.com, scientist and podcaster Latif Nasser saw the poster and became intrigued by Zoozve. Nasser eventually lobbied for 2002 VE68 to be formally named “Zoozve."

And succeeded.

The WGSBN bulletin contains several other whimsical names, including:

Pitufo, aka 1981 ET27, named for the Spanish word for "Smurf";

Curupira, aka 2016 HL, named for "a Brazilian indigenous folklore legendary creature, whose main purpose is to protect the forest against hunters and poachers";

Gabaldon, aka KY65, named for the scientist and author Diana J Gabaldon who wrote the Outlander series of novels and is also the great-granddaughter of Stanley Sykes, who built the telescope used to discover Pluto.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/13/venusian_quasi_moon_named_zoozve/