We’ve got solar cars and solar heating for homes. Well, how about solar driven spacecraft? I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.
Last October, NASA launched its Deep Space 1 mission, equipped with some of the latest technologies in space exploration. Fran Bagenal is an associate professor in the department of planetary sciences at the University of Colorado and a collaborator on Deep Space 1.
“The main thing that the Deep Space 1 mission intends to accomplish is to test various technologies that we would like to see implemented for other space exploration missions.”
One of these new devices is an Ion Drive Propulsion system, which harnesses energy from the Sun to help propel the craft through space.
“What that entails is collecting the energy from the sun, converting it using solar cells. But you use that energy basically, to take gas, ionize it, then accelerate the ions out of the back of the spacecraft and send the spacecraft forward.”
But what happens when the spacecraft draws farther away from the sun?
“It’s true that the sun’s energy goes down as you move away from the sun, but at the same time, the gravitational pull of the sun goes down and these actually compensate for each other. And so you could use Ion-Propulsion very efficiently to go to large distances in the solar system. But I think that the greatest advantage of Ion-Drive is that you can constantly adjust where you’re going. You can sort of custom design your trajectories to optimize the science you want to do.”
The new Ion- Drive has proved to be ten times as efficient as conventional propulsion systems.
Additional funding for Pulse of the Planet has been provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.