Comments on: Solar Sail Success! Japanese Spacecraft Propelled by the Sun’s Force

By: rut ham cau

rut ham cau — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 05:06:31 +0000

Just wanted to let you know that I enjoy reading your posts. Dont have much to add, cheers!

By: Zucchi

Zucchi — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:34:12 +0000

I love it when a staple of hard science fiction, something that should work in theory, is made to work in practice.

By: ryan

ryan — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:17:15 +0000

did they get that from star wars 2?

By: TCs

TCs — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:17:29 +0000

m @2 : Wikipedia says: "The craft will spend six months traveling to Venus." There is going to be a flyby, apparently. And g, in this case, means grams, not 9.81 m/s^2. They are talking about a force of 1.12 mN, which is the Earth weight of a 114 mg object.

By: m

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:06:58 +0000

I would add Benjamin, that calling this an “interplanetary flight” is a bit of a stretch. I dont want to take away the success of working technology here…but interplanetary flight???

Talk about hamming it up.

By: Benjamin Franz

Benjamin Franz — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:48:03 +0000

The press release wasn’t vetted very well. It says it is experiencing a thrust of 1.12 milli-newtons and a net acceleration of 0.114g or about 1.1 meter/second squared.

Unless the entire satellite only masses 1 gram that is pretty unlikely.