NASA Solar Sail Is the 'Little Satellite That Could'

If you gaze up at the night sky on April 26 or 27, you might catch a glimpse of a promising new technology, a cult favorite of astrogeeks and something of a taxpayer treat in one shiny package -- NASA's NanoSail-D2 cruising past Earth using the power of the sun.

The 100-square-foot polymer solar sail unfurled in low Earth orbit about 400 miles out on Jan. 20. Since then, it's been making its way through space, spawning a Twitter feed, photo contest and winning some surprisingly enthusiastic followers.

Not bad for a little satellite that almost wasn't -- more than once.

Actually, the NanoSail currently in space was not the one intended to make it off the ground. It was supposed to stay on Earth as backup for the first one. But the commercial rocket carrying it, Falcon 1, didn't separate stages properly after takeoff and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Down to Davy Jones' Locker went not only some of the ashes of "Star Trek's" Scotty, James Doohan, and former astronaut Leroy Gordon "Gordo" Cooper, but NASA's hopes of being the first to deploy a solar sail in space.

That honor went about a year and a half later to Japan's IKAROS solar sail demonstrator (a rare poetic acronym for "Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun").

The second NanoSail, D2, flew into space from Kodiak, Alaska, Nov. 19, 2010. Packed for deployment, it was about the size of a loaf of bread and carried inside was something roughly the size of a washing machine NASA called a FASTSAT: Fast, Affordable Science and Technology Satellite. Free flying in space, FASTSAT apparently ejected the little solar sail Dec. 6.

After that came a smooth deployment, like Count Dooku's "Star Wars" Geonosian solar sailor, right? Nope. In fact, it looked briefly as though NanoSail-D2 would be declared lost in space.

Trying to save the mission, NASA recruited the efforts of ham radio operators to listen for its beacon signal. Then, "on Jan. 17, NanoSail-D2 decided it wanted to come out of FASTSAT and do its own thing, and it's been sailing ever since," Dean Alhorn, principal investigator for NanoSail-D at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., told AOL News.



How does Nano sail? It's not by solar winds pushing it, but actually the very small force from particles of light that emanate from the sun, called photons. Not quite the smooth sailing moviegoers saw in "Attack of the Clones."

"Count Dooku would have taken months to move from the position he was in, and would have needed a bigger sail," said Alhorn, a "Star Wars" buff. Solar sails can't just be unfurled to surf space currents. "We measure the speed in tenths of millimeters per second squared. [But] that acceleration is constant, so as time adds up, you can get going very fast," he explained.

So fast that in a race between a rocket and a solar sail, the sail would win as its speed increases exponentially -- meaning that during the last leg of the race the sail would very quickly overtake the rocket and beat its time considerably.

Alhorn figures the cost itself of the NanoSail-D2 to be something of a bargain -- about $250,000. Compare that to the $450 million price tag of a space shuttle mission, the $19,995 cost of a deluxe space burial and the very low price of solar radiation -- and soon you'll understand the technology's promise.

For the moment, though, Alhorn said NanoSail-D2 is more about observing how solar sails behave -- for instance, what they'll do in orbit or if they'll change the plane at which they "fly" through space.

The next generation in the proposal stage, called FeatherSail, which will enlist the design help of college students, will be more about the possibility of experiments -- even an interstellar mission, Alhorn added.

If future space explorers harness solar sails and ride them to the galaxy's edge, remember where NASA began: With a low-priority project that once went by the nickname "LunchSat." It seemed that the only time people could find to work on NanoSail-D2 was during their lunch break.

Are you following AOL Weird News on Facebook and Twitter?