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2024-11-11

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NASA's solar sail successfully spreads its wings in space (www.space.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

There's a paper from 1984 that worked out the math for a two-sail system that could get a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, and slow down and end up in that gravity well, with a 41-year mission time. It would do so by discarding a reflector that points backward at the actual payload with its own sail. The paper also proposes a mechanism for a round trip mission, too, using 3 sails.