Saturday, May 7, 2005

Cosmos

Someday very soon, the privately-financed Cosmos mission will be launched by a submerged Russian submarine. The objective is to test an honest-to-goodness solar sail. If you've never heard of this sort of propulsion system, they're quite interesting. The basic idea is to leverage the power in the photons (light) streaming out from the sun, by capturing them or reflecting them from a large "sail" constructed of ultra-lightweight materials.

Here's the Cosmos site, and here's a good Wikipedia article on the whole idea...

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