Related papers: Photonic spin control for solar wind electric sail
Lightsails are a highly promising spacecraft concept that has attracted interest in recent years due to its potential to travel at near-relativistic speeds. Such speeds, which current conventional crafts cannot reach, offer tantalizing…
Solar sails can play a critical role in enabling solar and heliophysics missions. Solar sail technology within NASA is currently at 80% of TRL-6, suitable for an in-flight technology demonstration. It is conceivable that an initial…
Solar sails with the capability of generating a tangential radiation pressure at the sun-pointing attitude, such as refractive sails can provide more efficient methods for attitude and orbital control of sailcraft. This paper presents the…
Space exploration is of paramount importance to advancing fundamental science and providing global services, such as navigation and communications. However, today's space missions are hindered by limitations of existing propulsion…
Spintronics, which aims at exploiting the spin degree of freedom of carriers inside electronic devices, has a huge potential for quantum computation and dissipationless interconnects. Ideally, spin currents in spintronic devices should be…
Solar sails enable missions to observe the solar environment from unique vantage points, such as sustained observations away from the Sun-Earth line; sub-L1 station keeping; high inclination solar orbits; Earth polar-sitting and…
A propulsion concept in which a spacecraft interacts with high-velocity pellets and the interstellar medium is proposed. The pellets are slower than the spacecraft and are accelerated backwards as they are overtaken, imparting a forward…
Because of the semi-collisional nature of the solar wind, the collisionless or exospheric approach as well as the hydrodynamic one are both inaccurate. However, the advantage of simplicity makes them useful for enlightening some basic…
Attempts to use Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) flow for propulsion have been made since the last century [1]. Limited success has been registered particularly due to the inhomogeneous generation of the thrust, and also the very light weight and…
Solar sails propelled by radiation pressure enable space missions that cannot be achieved using chemical rockets alone. Significant in-space propulsion for missions such as a solar polar orbiter may be achieved with a sail that deviates…
One of the basic properties of the solar wind, that is the high speed of the fast wind, is still not satisfactorily explained. This is mainly due to the theoretical difficulty of treating weakly collisional plasmas. The fluid approach…
Background: A solar sail presents a large sheet of low areal density membrane and is the most elegant propellant-less propulsion system for the future exploration of the Solar System and beyond. By today the study on sail membrane…
We propose to use metasurfaces as a mean of controlling radiation pressure for increasing the range of motions of spacecraft solar sails. Specifically, we present a theoretical study of different electromagnetic field configurations, and…
Electromagnetic waves carry energy, linear momentum, and angular momentum. When light (or other electromagnetic radiation) interacts with material media, both energy and momentum are usually exchanged. The force and torque experienced by…
In this paper, we explore from a conceptual standpoint the possibility of using natural astrophysical sources to accelerate spacecrafts to relativistic speeds. We focus on light sails and electric sails, which are reliant on momentum…
In this work, the orbital evolution of these objects that are located in the geostationary orbit (GEO) is analyzed. Knowing this, the possibility of using a solar sail is considered to help to clean the space environment. The main natural…
This article is devoted to research the application of the spacecraft with a solar sail to support the certain climatic conditions in an area of the Mars surface. Authors propose principles of functioning of the spacecraft, intended to…
We propose and investigate a spin-cell device which provides the necessary spin-motive force to drive a spin current for future spintronic circuits. Our spin-cell have four basic characteristics: (i) it has two poles so that a spin current…
The photonic spin Hall effect (SHE), featured by a spin-dependent transverse shift of an impinging optical beam driven by its polarization handedness, has many applications including precise metrology and spin-based nanophotonic devices. It…
Kinetic exospheric models revealed that the solar wind is accelerated by an ambipolar electric field up to supersonic velocities. The presence of suprathermal Strahl electrons at the exobase can further increase the velocity to higher…