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NASA's solar sail successfully spreads its wings in space
(www.space.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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The solar sail reflects light instead of absorbing it so you get to double dip on photon momentum.
And sure, you can steer with the laser I suppose, but with that kind of super weak deltaV, you’re not going to be exactly doing donuts in the solar system.
Even the massive solar sail only imparts a super small amount of force. It’s only useful because it does so for free over a long period of time with no air resistance.
You’d be better off using a conventional thruster to do whatever steering you needed to do before letting the sail take over. It’s not like you need to steer around any obstacles.