Circular Solar Sails

Circular sails are large, spinning disks supported only by lightweight tension lines to carry loads except at the center, where a structure is needed to carry loads between the payload, control system, and sail. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory studied a solar sail design similar to those shown below in the late 1970's for a rendezvous with Halley's comet. The Space Regatta Consortium (SRC) is currently developing spacecraft like these for illumination of cities in the Arctic circle and as solar sails.

The pictures above were modeled using Mops and rendered with the Blue Moon Rendering Tools. Here are the Mops and Rib files for these images:

• disk.mop - Mops file for both images
• disk.rib - Rib file for first image
• disk2.rib - Rib file for second image

The pictures below are the original images for this page that were rendered with the Persistance of Vision Ray Tracer (Povray). This sail is controlled by allowing sail panels to move outwards so sunlight pushes off center to turn the sail. Select here for the Povray source.