New solar sails as efficient as 20% of the speed of light.

The first to propose the idea of solar sails was the astronomer Johannes Kepler in the 17th century and he did so by observing the cosmos and using logic, Kepler verified that the tails of comets always pointed in the opposite direction to the sun. From this he deduced that the sun must generate some type of repulsive force that propelled those tails to be placed in that position.

Can you imagine a space sailboat in the 17th century traveling to Mars or Venus, that was one of Kepler's dreams and although Kepler provided the basic idea, there was still a lot of mathematical work to be done and of course a lot of development time to be able to create the materials that would actually make a light candle, because in the end it turns out that light candles are a magnificent idea.

A light sail works as a mirror, reflecting photons from the sun or a powerful laser, which generates a small impulse in the opposite direction, similar to the push that the wind makes when it hits the sail of a ship, but if the photons have no mass, how can they push something? They have no mass, but they have something called linear momentum, and when a photon hits a light sail, it transfers part of its linear momentum to the sail, pushing it, and this causes the sail or any other object that reflection of the photos ends up being slightly pushed.

Unfortunately that moment produces a very very small thrust, if it were not this small every time we went out home and faced the sun we would receive a slap from the sun's photons, hundreds of square meters of light sail are needed to propel a small probe of just a few kilos to send, a manned spacecraft to, for example, Mars would require tens of square kilometers of light sail and that is a lot of weight, it is a lot of mass of the sail, in addition to a design pain for any engineer, since it has to be deployed in efficiently, that is why they seek to create sails with ultra-light materials that are more efficient in order to achieve greater thrust with less sail mass.

Through work by researchers from the North Laboratory of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Besa Laboratory of Bron University in the United States, these researchers have developed a prototype of a tiny light candle. It is a prototype that is only 60 mm wide by 60 mm long, but with a thickness of only 200 nanometers, that is a tiny fraction of a human hair.

What they have done is put on the surface of that sail an intricate design with billions of holes at a nanometer scale, this helps reduce the weight of the sail material and increases its ability to reflect light and this gives the sail greater acceleration potential, a ship equipped with a light sail of this type would be a Ferrari or a Bugatti from space.

The researchers who have achieved this breakthrough are Miguel Bessa, associate professor at the Brown School of Engineering, who co-led the research together with Richard Norte, associate professor at Delf University of Technology. Miguel Bessa stated that “Richard's team's experimental breakthrough demonstrates that their manufacturing process is scalable to the dimensions necessary for interstellar travel and that it can be performed cost-effectively. At the same time, my team is very excited to see the essential role of our latest machine learning-guided optimization method in solving such an engineering problem.” interesting and complex

We already have the technology to build ships powered by light sails, but is this possible? Is it real now? The answer is yes, it is not something of the future. Various nations are involved in the development of space sailboats and it has already been done. We have already traveled to another planet with a light sail. I highlight the Japanese Ikaros mission, which at the moment is the only flight that has been made beyond the Earth with a solar sail or light sail. The ship was launched on May 20, 2010. bound for the planet Venus, but the Ikaros was not 100% powered by a light sail, it also combined the drive with a dash engine, which is a good idea to combine several sources of drive.

Keep in mind that a solar sail does not allow a ship to be taken from Earth, Mars, or the Moon, a light sail would not be able to overcome gravity even from very small worlds, which is why initially a rocket will be needed to take the ship into space and once there deploy the light sail.

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