- #1
hewhorizons
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I was thinking about how much propulsion you could get out of a solar sail, so I just did a rough calculation:
A solar sail 100m*100m in size (10'000m²), with 20grams of weight per m², an additional 100kg for probe and other stuff, so 300kg probe weight. Using the solar constant of 1400W/m², this should give us an 5256m/s of deltaV per year with ~50mN of thrust through the sail.
I know there are a lot of factors which i haven't considered here, like increasing distance to the sun for interstellar travel, the weight is probably to optimistic too. Just wanted to know if 5256m/s is correct so I can continue from there.
A solar sail 100m*100m in size (10'000m²), with 20grams of weight per m², an additional 100kg for probe and other stuff, so 300kg probe weight. Using the solar constant of 1400W/m², this should give us an 5256m/s of deltaV per year with ~50mN of thrust through the sail.
I know there are a lot of factors which i haven't considered here, like increasing distance to the sun for interstellar travel, the weight is probably to optimistic too. Just wanted to know if 5256m/s is correct so I can continue from there.