To the stars in the sailboat

1999/09/12 Elosegi Irurtia, Migel M.

• Astronautika

In several NASA projects there are some that look like science fiction, but they are reality. In the future, spacecraft will be dragged by the wind of the Sun through space. The wind of the Sun is formed by the electric particles that the Sun sends from the crown and without direction. Besides being free, the future propulsion system will be more efficient, as it moves ten times faster than the speed of the current spacecraft. All of them are a result of the tests done with the Deep Space 1 probe.

If the results obtained in the research carried out with the aforementioned probe could materialize in practice, in a single day they could travel 7 million kilometers, for example, one more year to go to Saturn. As a result of the data obtained in solar wind research, NASA has begun to take steps in designing spacecraft that should be adapted to these characteristics. At the base, spacecraft should have giant candles made of carbon fiber coated with aluminum layer. According to NASA projects, the Geostorms spacecraft will be ready for 2005, the first one to travel accompanied by solar wind. They want to send it to a point called heliopausa, where the wind of the Sun joins the wind that sends other stars outside our Solar System.

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