Electric sail

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Published on January 8, 2022 7:05:33 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJeTw4tjIzA

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Electric sail, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10031328 / CC BY SA 3.0

#CubeSats
#Finnish_inventions
#Spacecraft_propulsion
#Solar_sailing
#Interstellar_travel
The Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System （HERTS） is a spacecraft concept using an electric sail An electric sail （also known as an electric
solar wind sail or an E-sail） is a proposed form of spacecraft propulsion using the dynamic pressure of the solar wind as a source of thrust.
It creates a "virtual" sail by using small wires to form an electric field that deflects solar wind protons and extracts their momentum.
The idea was first conceptualised by Pekka Janhunen in 2006 at the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
The electric sail consists of a number of thin, long and conducting tethers which are kept in a high positive potential by an onboard electron gun.
The positively charged tethers deflect solar wind protons, thus extracting momentum from them.
Simultaneously they attract electrons from the solar wind plasma, producing an electron current.
The electron gun compensates for the arriving electric current.
One way to deploy the tethers is to rotate the spacecraft, using centrifugal force to keep them stretched.
By fine-tuning the potentials of individual tethers and thus the solar wind force individually, the spacecraft's attitude can be controlled.
E-sail missions can be launched at almost any time with only minor variations in travel time.
By contrast, conventional slingshot missions must wait for the planets to reach a particular alignment.
Artist's rendering of ESTCube-1, launched in May 2013, which was intended to be the first satellite to test an electric sail.
The electric solar wind sail has little in common with the traditional solar sail.
The E-sail gets its momentum from the solar wind ions, whilst a photonic sail is propelled by photons.
Thus, the available pressure is only about 1% of photon pressure; however, this may be compensated by the simplicity of scale-up.
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