Solar sails are in the news again, and this time not just for blowing up. The Japanese space agency is launching what they hope to be the first successful solar sail tomorrow. In honor of that, we will be discussing the physics of solar sails.
First of all, what the heck are solar sails? Solar sails are a means of propulsion based on the simple observation that "Hey, sails work on boats. Therefore, they should work on interplanetary spacecraft (in space)." Boat sails work when air molecules hit into the sail and bounce back. By conservation of momentum, this gives the boat sail an itty bitty boost in momentum. Summing over the large number of air molecules moving as wind, the boat gets pushed along in the water. A similar process works with solar sails, but instead of air molecules doing the hitting, it's photons. Since each photon of a given wavelength has some momentum, by reflecting that photon the solar sail can gain a tiny bit of momentum. Summing over the large number of photons coming from the sun over a long time frame we can get a considerable boost. So let's see how good solar sails are.
