Carl Sagan // Current TV

On the 75th anniversary of astronomer Carl Sagan's birth, the Planetary Society announced their plans to sail a spacecraft on sunlight alone by the end of 2010. Called LightSail, the project will launch three separate spacecraft over the course of several years, beginning with LightSail-1, which will demonstrate that sunlight alone can propel a spacecraft in Earth orbit. LightSails 2 and 3, will travel farther into .

Sagan, co-founder of the Planetary Society was a long-time advocate of solar sailing.

On today's 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, Sagan’s widow and collaborator, Ann Druyan said this project is a "Wright Brothers Kitty Hawk-type" enterprise of inventing and proving a new way of moving through the cosmos.

"On one episode of Cosmos, we wrote 'We have lingered too long on the shores of the cosmic ocean. It's time to set sail for the stars,'" she said. "And that's what I was thinking when it became clear that we had the resources to mount this expedition, that we are serious at The Planetary Society. And at Cosmos Studios, my company which provided the principal support for the first 10 years of this project, we're really serious about giving our kids a future in which science and technology is used in its most wise and benign and forward-looking possible way.

That's why I'm so thrilled and I just think if Carl were alive he would have been absolutely overcome at the notion that The Planetary Society is mounting its own space program, let alone its own launch."

The solar sail project was boosted by a one-million-dollar anonymous donation.
Taking advantage of the technological advances in micro- and nano-spacecraft over the past five years, The Planetary Society will build LightSail-1 with three Cubesat spacecraft. One Cubesat will form the central electronics and control module, and two additional Cubesats will house the solar sail module. Cameras, additional sensors, and a control system will be added to the basic Cubesat electronics bus.

Reflected light pressure, not the solar wind, propels solar sails. The push of photons against a mirror-bright surface can continuously change orbital energy and spacecraft velocity. LightSail-1 will have four triangular sails, arranged in a diamond shape resembling a giant kite. Constructed of 32 square meters of mylar, LightSail-1 will be placed in an orbit over 800 kilometers above Earth, high enough to escape the drag of Earth’s uppermost atmosphere. At that altitude the spacecraft will be subject only to the force of gravity keeping it in orbit and the pressure of sunlight on its sails increasing the orbital energy.

Lightsail-2 will demonstrate a longer duration flight to higher Earth orbits. LightSail-3 will go to the Sun-Earth Libration Point, L1, where solar sails could be permanently placed as solar weather stations, monitoring the geomagnetic storms from the Sun that potentially endanger electrical grids and satellite systems around Earth.

The Planetary Society’s attempt in 2005 to launch the world's first solar sail, Cosmos 1, was scuttled when its launch vehicle, a Russian Volna rocket, failed to reach Earth orbit.

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/11/09/planetary-society-to-launch-three-separate-solar-sails/On the 75th anniversary of astronomer Carl Sagan's birth, the Planetary Society... more

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Philip Marchand: How Fantasy Took Over Science Fiction

"Harry Potter rules. The unflagging energy of his creator, J.K. Rowling, writing volume after volume, sustains this phenomenon. The success of the latest movie version, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, confirms it.

On the whole, Potter’s seems a benign rule. Educators, publishers, literati are reassured by the success of the Potter books that young people, even in their media-saturated, video-game-enhanced existences, can still read if they feel like it. Critics have generally been respectful of Rowling’s literary achievement. Perhaps the only fervent objectors have been religious fundamentalists who take wizardry and magic seriously, as the handiwork of the Evil One.

You don’t have to be a fundamentalist, however, to wonder what this triumph of fantasy in our popular culture portends. An atheist such as W.P. Kinsella ignores his own core beliefs and practically makes a living out of a sub-genre of fantasy, i.e. baseball fantasy. He has never lacked for a readership.

One effect of this triumph seems to be the increasing presence of fantasy, or elements of fantasy, in works of science fiction, a genre traditionally opposed to magic and even to such folk-scientific phenomena as UFOs. In a way, the trend to fantasy is not due simply to its superior commercial appeal, as demonstrated by the Potter books, and by Kinsella, but also to developments in science itself. “We have reached the point where contemporary science is so far out, to most people it is indistinguishable from magic,” comments well-known Canadian science fiction novelist Robert J. Sawyer. “The notion, for example, that black holes might provide not only links between space but links to time is grounded in current theoretical thinking.”

The recent movie Star Trek is a case in point. The latest movie version is much more space opera than science fiction. It even features a sword fight between the good guys and the Romulans. What really marks the movie as more fantasy than science fiction, however, is its use of our old friend time travel. As Sawyer admits, it’s very hard to avoid using the device these days — he has used time travel, although with gritted teeth, and with a certain scrupulosity. “We pay attention to what physicists actually know,” he says of himself and his sci-fi colleagues. “We don’t wield it like a magic wand.”

A striking example is the 1985 novel Contact by the late astronomer Carl Sagan. There was no more dedicated anti-supernaturalist than Carl Sagan. The fervour with which he speculated about black holes, however, left the suspicion that these phenomena were, to him, the equivalent of magic doors in fantasyland. The suspicion was confirmed by the novel and the movie made from it, in which the heroine, played by Jodie Foster, voyages into space and ends up, literally, in another realm, where her deceased father apparently resides.

It was a striking example of the kind of wish-fulfillment Sawyer maintains is characteristic of fantasy and magic, as opposed to the devices of science fiction. (Ray Kinsella playing catch with his dead father at the end of Field of Dreams is classic wish-fulfillment.) It is hard, evidently, to avoid such wish-fulfillment. Somebody like Sagan throws traditional, religious otherworldliness out the front door, and it comes knocking at the back window.""Harry Potter rules. The unflagging energy of his creator, J.K. Rowling, writing... more

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