solar sail set to blast off

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well, i hope those astronaughts are ready to go on a one way flight AWAY from any star

hehehe

 

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I never thought it was particualrly practical as a long term idea but I was looking forawrd to seeing how it would perform.

 

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It just crashed. HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR

 

From Earths orbit you get around 4 micro pascals of pressure. So you need a pretty impressive area to get any kind of force behind that. Of course whether or not the whole idea is thermodynamcially possible is a contentious issue and was the point I was looking forward to seeing resolved. If the mirror is perfecly reflective the the light would not lose any temperature, if this were the case how could any energy be transferred to the sail. So for any energy to be transferred the mirror would have to absob some photons. This would case the mirror to heat up and emit photons of its own. Anyone whos seen the secondary school physics experiment with the Crookes radiometer will have seen the device spin with the shiny edge leading because its cooler. Applying a billiard ball idea to momentum to photons maybe an analogy too far especially if its at the expense of thermodynamics. As im into optics i was looking forward to finding out which argument was right.

 

yeah..... but stuff always goes wrong when cool stuff is about to happen.....

so I to a certain extent hear ya'

 

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My instinct tells me it'll work and now im getting obsessed with this damn problem, still its keeping me sharp. All this dielectric stuff ive been doing recently my quantum is going down the pan. Though I still have some nagiing doubts which is why id have liked to see it. Though my biggest issue is still one of point. To do anything useful its sail needs to be massive from earths orbit as force will drop off as 1/r^2.

 

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I think it does work but a lot of the calculations which seem to be floating round the net look oversimplified. Of course a perfect mirror does not (and i believe cannot exist). The momentum imprated by and absobed photon is less than that of a reflected photon which is of course one of the reasons that a reflective mirror is preferable to a black sheet. However will also increase thermal energy and emission of photons, another reason its not favourable. Either way im still a little unhappy with Golds implication that quantum mechanics somehow overrides thermodynamics. Quantum mechanics must obey the rules in the same way as classical mechanics. Though I guess its irrelevant now at least for a coule of years.

 

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