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Cube Sail and other solar sails
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A new approach to solar sails is taking shape in a clean room in an Illinois laboratory. Researchers there have designed a sail that would unfurl from bobbins into a giant space ribbon 250 meters long, says Victoria Coverstone, an aerospace engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This project, also dubbed Cube Sail, is basically ready to fly, she says, if the team can find money for a launch and to upgrade the Mylar film that makes up the sail. The Illinois group next aims to test a spinning deployment of sail blades, on the way to an ambitiously large spinning sail whose rotating blades could measure up to 5 or even 10 kilometers long.
Meanwhile, the German space agency DLR and the European Space Agency are planning their own series of solar sails dubbed Gossamer. The first of these would launch a 25-square-meter sail into Earth orbit in 2014, followed by bigger ones over the next several years.
The Dynamics and Control of the Cubesail Mission — A Solar Sailing Demonstration (227 pages)
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