I remember first reading about solar sails in Poul Anderson’s “Sunjammer” (The cover of the 1964 issue of attributes it to Winston P. Sanders) in THE COLLECTED SHORT WORKS OF POUL ANDERSON (Volume 3, THE SATURN GAME)
What I didn’t know until recently, was that solar sails are a very old idea: “Almost 400 years ago, German astronomer Johannes Kepler observed comet tails being blown by what he thought to be a solar ‘breeze.’ This observation inspired him to suggest that ‘ships and sails proper for heavenly air should be fashioned’ to glide through space.
“Little did Kepler know, the best way to propel a solar sail is not by means of solar wind, but rather by the force of sunlight itself. In 1873, James Clerk Maxwell first demonstrated that sunlight exerts a small amount of pressure as photons bounce off a reflective surface. This kind of pressure is the basis of all modern solar sail designs.”
We hear a lot about using solar sails for unpowered interstellar flight, but there would be a zillion obstacles to overcome there, among them how to “freeze people” for that long; and how would ANY vessel survive that long in interstellar space?
More practically, how about using solar sail powered craft to land and prepare an asteroid for mining. In fact, there might be a lot to recommend this.
What if we dispatched a solar sail package with an artificial intelligence and enough equipment with a 3D printer to begin to assemble an asteroid lander package, built around a lightweight container with everything needed for the first mission.
The printer makes the lander as the sail, controlled by computer – maybe even with help from a shot or two of a high-intensity laser that’s in Earth orbit or on the Moon or orbiting the Moon, heads for the asteroid, giving it the energy to reach and deploy onto the surface of the target asteroid.
Once down, it can begin to disassemble the lander and rebuild it into a digger of some sort; perhaps a drill rig. The drill punctures the surface, pulling up material that a small lab on the lander analyzes, manufacturing extensions to keep drilling until something interesting is discovered. Hopefully, the University of Adeleide, Integrated Mining Consortium (https://www.adelaide.edu.au/integrated-mining-consortium/) could conceivably be involved! This branch of the university is “applying Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT), advanced sensing, data analytics and machine learning to improve mining operations, mineral processing and recovery. We are looking at the entire mine value chain from in-place resources to final products. The ultimate aim is to increase the value of complex resources. Complex minerals are those that are increasingly harder to mine or process.”
Initially of course, likely target asteroids can be detected, for example, via a cooperative venture between the Catalina Telescope in Arizona, and the European Space Agency’s Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to follow up on the initial sighting: “[As of December 2022], We have now discovered 30,039 near-Earth asteroids in the Solar System – rocky bodies orbiting the Sun on a path that brings them close to Earth’s orbit. The majority of these were discovered in the last decade, showing how our ability to detect potentially risky asteroids is rapidly improving.”
But need we look at them as “risky” or as an opportunity?
Obviously, we can’t launch a Falcon spacecraft for every asteroid sighting! But what if we created a fleet of cube satellites with steerable solar sails to spend time following AI or ground-plotted intercept courses for likely asteroids?
Once a likely candidate – or even a half-dozen likely candidates! – are located, they can be tagged with a transponder of some sort. When enough likely candidates are identified, a solar-sail-survey (SSS) is plotted and a series of small exploratory probes are dropped. The solar sail delivery vehicle returns to Lagrange or Lunar or even Earth Orbit to be repacked, resupplied, and then launched once again on a tour.
It wouldn’t take long for the area around Earth to be full of prospecting robots who, once they found something interesting might send for a Human to take a look around – or even initiate the mining.
The SAFE idea is that these teeny craft would NOT HAVE THE CAPABILITY of manufacturing rocket engines that could alter an asteroid’s orbit and send it on an apocalyptic collision course with Earth – or the continent of choice. They would be workhorse robots; purely machines with a job to do; using simple technology and not require refueling. This might open up direct investment by countries and people without space-launch ability to become involved with the exploration and exploitation of space. (I can even imagine ARTISTS vying to create reflecting sparkles in the night skies of various countries! Just sayin'!)
THEN, we could send Humans to assist the mining operations as well as set up more systems that would package ore for lofting into the asteroid’s orbit in order to be gathered up and delivered to Orbital processing facilities so that we might see headlines like these on our cellphones: “Successful Closing Joint Venture: ‘NewHeight Asteroid Mining can now move to the forefront of responsible development of Nigerian-sourced critical minerals for the world-wide manufacture of clean energy and clean transportation technologies such as battery storage, wind and solar generation and electric vehicles’; Shanice Johnson-Bode, NHAsteroid chairwoman, president and CEO, said in a statement.”
Our biggest problem would be to violently avoid the attitude that gripped European Colonizers who arrived on the North American continent, noted and catalogued say, bison or white pine forests on the eastern edge of Minnesota with the attitude that: “People thought that the forests of white pines, 200 feet tall and stretching for miles, would last forever. Between 1776 and 1940 2.4 quadrillion board feet of white pine was logged. All of this wood stacked in a city block would stack 400 miles high! By the 1950’s all of the vast forests of white pines had been cut down. The only remaining stands were small pockets in very remote areas such as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.” (https://wildernessclassroom.org/wilderness-library/eastern-white-pine/)
Even the asteroids are a limited resource! I hope (and work toward) a change in attitude for ALL of us!
New Source:
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/31jul_solarsails#:~:text=Almost%20400%20years%20ago%2C%20German,fashioned%22%20to%20glide%20through%20space.; solar sails in fiction:
https://www.tor.com/2019/06/03/light-sails-in-science-and-fiction/comment-page-1/ ;https://www.universetoday.com/153335/lightsail-2-has-been-flying-for-30-months-now-paving-the-way-for-future-solar-sail-missions/
Resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approaches_to_Earth, https://www.pharostribune.com/news/local_news/article_7fcd3ea5-3c14-533f-a8d5-9bf629922f34.html, https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/04/29/like-asteroid-mining-be-careful-what-you-wish-for/, https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/learn/historyculture/theroadtothefirstflight.htm, https://hackaday.com/2019/03/27/extraterrestrial-excavation-digging-holes-on-other-worlds/, https://www.planetary.org/space-missions/every-small-worlds-mission ; https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/31jul_solarsails#:~:text=Almost%20400%20years%20ago%2C%20German,fashioned%22%20to%20glide%20through%20space. ;
Image: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/A2D5/production/_114558614_hls-eva-apr2020.jpg
What I didn’t know until recently, was that solar sails are a very old idea: “Almost 400 years ago, German astronomer Johannes Kepler observed comet tails being blown by what he thought to be a solar ‘breeze.’ This observation inspired him to suggest that ‘ships and sails proper for heavenly air should be fashioned’ to glide through space.
“Little did Kepler know, the best way to propel a solar sail is not by means of solar wind, but rather by the force of sunlight itself. In 1873, James Clerk Maxwell first demonstrated that sunlight exerts a small amount of pressure as photons bounce off a reflective surface. This kind of pressure is the basis of all modern solar sail designs.”
We hear a lot about using solar sails for unpowered interstellar flight, but there would be a zillion obstacles to overcome there, among them how to “freeze people” for that long; and how would ANY vessel survive that long in interstellar space?
More practically, how about using solar sail powered craft to land and prepare an asteroid for mining. In fact, there might be a lot to recommend this.
SHEER SPECULATION ALERT!!!
The printer makes the lander as the sail, controlled by computer – maybe even with help from a shot or two of a high-intensity laser that’s in Earth orbit or on the Moon or orbiting the Moon, heads for the asteroid, giving it the energy to reach and deploy onto the surface of the target asteroid.
Once down, it can begin to disassemble the lander and rebuild it into a digger of some sort; perhaps a drill rig. The drill punctures the surface, pulling up material that a small lab on the lander analyzes, manufacturing extensions to keep drilling until something interesting is discovered. Hopefully, the University of Adeleide, Integrated Mining Consortium (https://www.adelaide.edu.au/integrated-mining-consortium/) could conceivably be involved! This branch of the university is “applying Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT), advanced sensing, data analytics and machine learning to improve mining operations, mineral processing and recovery. We are looking at the entire mine value chain from in-place resources to final products. The ultimate aim is to increase the value of complex resources. Complex minerals are those that are increasingly harder to mine or process.”
Initially of course, likely target asteroids can be detected, for example, via a cooperative venture between the Catalina Telescope in Arizona, and the European Space Agency’s Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to follow up on the initial sighting: “[As of December 2022], We have now discovered 30,039 near-Earth asteroids in the Solar System – rocky bodies orbiting the Sun on a path that brings them close to Earth’s orbit. The majority of these were discovered in the last decade, showing how our ability to detect potentially risky asteroids is rapidly improving.”
But need we look at them as “risky” or as an opportunity?
Obviously, we can’t launch a Falcon spacecraft for every asteroid sighting! But what if we created a fleet of cube satellites with steerable solar sails to spend time following AI or ground-plotted intercept courses for likely asteroids?
Once a likely candidate – or even a half-dozen likely candidates! – are located, they can be tagged with a transponder of some sort. When enough likely candidates are identified, a solar-sail-survey (SSS) is plotted and a series of small exploratory probes are dropped. The solar sail delivery vehicle returns to Lagrange or Lunar or even Earth Orbit to be repacked, resupplied, and then launched once again on a tour.
It wouldn’t take long for the area around Earth to be full of prospecting robots who, once they found something interesting might send for a Human to take a look around – or even initiate the mining.
The SAFE idea is that these teeny craft would NOT HAVE THE CAPABILITY of manufacturing rocket engines that could alter an asteroid’s orbit and send it on an apocalyptic collision course with Earth – or the continent of choice. They would be workhorse robots; purely machines with a job to do; using simple technology and not require refueling. This might open up direct investment by countries and people without space-launch ability to become involved with the exploration and exploitation of space. (I can even imagine ARTISTS vying to create reflecting sparkles in the night skies of various countries! Just sayin'!)
THEN, we could send Humans to assist the mining operations as well as set up more systems that would package ore for lofting into the asteroid’s orbit in order to be gathered up and delivered to Orbital processing facilities so that we might see headlines like these on our cellphones: “Successful Closing Joint Venture: ‘NewHeight Asteroid Mining can now move to the forefront of responsible development of Nigerian-sourced critical minerals for the world-wide manufacture of clean energy and clean transportation technologies such as battery storage, wind and solar generation and electric vehicles’; Shanice Johnson-Bode, NHAsteroid chairwoman, president and CEO, said in a statement.”
Our biggest problem would be to violently avoid the attitude that gripped European Colonizers who arrived on the North American continent, noted and catalogued say, bison or white pine forests on the eastern edge of Minnesota with the attitude that: “People thought that the forests of white pines, 200 feet tall and stretching for miles, would last forever. Between 1776 and 1940 2.4 quadrillion board feet of white pine was logged. All of this wood stacked in a city block would stack 400 miles high! By the 1950’s all of the vast forests of white pines had been cut down. The only remaining stands were small pockets in very remote areas such as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.” (https://wildernessclassroom.org/wilderness-library/eastern-white-pine/)
Even the asteroids are a limited resource! I hope (and work toward) a change in attitude for ALL of us!
New Source:
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/31jul_solarsails#:~:text=Almost%20400%20years%20ago%2C%20German,fashioned%22%20to%20glide%20through%20space.; solar sails in fiction:
https://www.tor.com/2019/06/03/light-sails-in-science-and-fiction/comment-page-1/ ;https://www.universetoday.com/153335/lightsail-2-has-been-flying-for-30-months-now-paving-the-way-for-future-solar-sail-missions/
Resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approaches_to_Earth, https://www.pharostribune.com/news/local_news/article_7fcd3ea5-3c14-533f-a8d5-9bf629922f34.html, https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/04/29/like-asteroid-mining-be-careful-what-you-wish-for/, https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/learn/historyculture/theroadtothefirstflight.htm, https://hackaday.com/2019/03/27/extraterrestrial-excavation-digging-holes-on-other-worlds/, https://www.planetary.org/space-missions/every-small-worlds-mission ; https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/31jul_solarsails#:~:text=Almost%20400%20years%20ago%2C%20German,fashioned%22%20to%20glide%20through%20space. ;
Image: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/A2D5/production/_114558614_hls-eva-apr2020.jpg
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