14 DAY TRIAL // Solar sails could one day clarify Einstein's Theory of Relativity, as they could provide a platform for testing the frame-dragging hypothesis, physics professor Roman Kezerashvili of the New York City College of Technology stated. During the International Symposium on Solar Sailing held July 21 at the college, he exposed his experiment.
Solar sailing is a way of moving around in space, in a spacecraft powered by sunlight, just like for a sailing ship on water. Solar sails are reflective arrays, one-fifth the thickness of saran wrap, that can have an area as large as half the size of a football field. They capture the pressure coming from the the sun's light and propel the spaceship. This way of traveling has many adepts and professor Kezerashvili is one of them.
Frame dragging appears when spinning bodies distort the space-time dimension, just a whirlpool in water. Einstein launched this theory without ever having the possibility of proving it. Theoretically if a spinning solar sail flies within 4.6 million miles of the sun, it should rotate differently than it would at a wider distance, depending on the strength of the frame-dragging effect. Kezerashvili added that the only way to find out if the frame-dragging effect even exists is to attach a motion sensor to a solar sail.
Bill Nye, TV's the Science Guy and incoming president of the Planetary Society, said that solar sails have different designs, according to each type of mission. “We won't see solar sails converge on a single shape. They will be like helicopters. Helicopters come in many different shapes, each for a different job,” he said.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) already launched a solar sail spacecraft in May. The Ikaros solar sail was launched along with the Akatsuki Venus orbiter, and it has successfully been flying through deep space. The Ikaros project leader at JAXA, Osamu Mori, said that future missions will add ion drives to solar sails in order to deliver probes to Jupiter and the Trojan asteroids. This way, engines will be sun-powered continuously, and will take less time to reach distant planets.
The Planetary Society's new solar sail project is called Lightsail-1 and it is due for launch in early 2011. NASA and the ESA have plans for solar sail missions, launched separately current 2015, space agencies representatives stated, according to space.com.