RI | Research | Projects | Solar Blade Solar Sail

Text only version of this site

Solar Blade Solar Sail This project is no longer active. Head: Richard Blomquist Contact: Richard Blomquist Mailing address: 2216 Newell-Simon Hall Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Associated centers: SRI and FRC For more information, see this project's homepage.

Jump to: Project Description | Personnel | Publications

Project Description

Solar sail concepts have existed for decades, but their implementation has been elusive; to date, no true solar sail craft have flown in space. The primary difficulty with solar sails has been the need for great sail surface area relative to the payload mass. Also, the cost associated with manufacturing very large sails and the risks of deploying such structures in space has hindered their development. For example early solar sail spacecraft designs with payloads weighing hundreds of kilograms in mass led to sails with dimensions of kilometers.

Carnegie Mellon University will employ nanosat technology to dramatically reduce spacecraft payload mass, which shrinks the size of the sail and overall spacecraft mass. This reduction of size and weight makes a heliogyro type sail design eminently more practical and flyable than previous solar sail spacecraft.

The promise of solar sailing in space is in the continuous propulsion derived from natural solar pressure. The absence of a conventional propulsion system aboard the spacecraft means a smaller spacecraft can carry larger payloads. Another advantage is that solar sailing makes possible exotic missions once thought impractical due to their large propellant requirements. Such missions include dwelling at Lagrange points, hovering over an Earth pole and cruising to asteroids.

Past members

	Name	Title	Email Address
	Richard Blomquist	PhD Student, RI
	Christopher Urmson	Dir of Tech for Urban Grand Challenge	curmson@ri.cmu.edu
	William Red L. Whittaker	University Professor	red@ri.cmu.edu

Publications

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• Solar Blade Nanosatellite Development: Heliogyro Deployment, Dynamics,and Control
  R. Blomquist
  Proceedings of the 13th USU / AIAA Small Satellite Conference, August, 1999.
  Download: pdf [246 KB] copyrighted