Timeline for Balancing a mirror
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 21, 2015 at 17:52 | comment | added | SE - stop firing the good guys | @LocalFluff I think you are grokking my question right. I am going to need station keeping, but I wondered if it existed some "for free" locations, similar to L-points, but instead balancing inertia, gravity of Mars, gravity of the Sun and radiation pressure. | |
| Dec 21, 2015 at 17:12 | comment | added | LocalFluff | @Hohmannfan Yeah, that sentence came out all wrong! A perfect mirror in such a "terminator orbit" should not spin up by some YORP effect and won't overheat. But it would of course drift outwards (as long as its beam hits Mars it won't matter globally for terraforming). You'll never get away from paying for some station keeping. The sunlight itself should help power it, though. The high exhaust speed of solar electric propulsion, with massive nobel gasses, makes me think you'd only need to pay way less than half the Solar power reflected to Mars, to counteract the Solar pressure. | |
| Dec 21, 2015 at 16:58 | comment | added | SE - stop firing the good guys | @LocalFluff The radiation perturbation is actually twice as high when reflecting instead of absorbing. | |
| Dec 21, 2015 at 16:48 | comment | added | LocalFluff | @Hohmannfan I think that the IRIS heliophysics satellite in Earth-Sun synchronous orbit is kind of an example of what James Jenkins suggested. A satellite which orbits over the terminator and (almost) always has the Sun in sight. As for light-pressure, I'd think that the greater fraction the mirror reflects, the less it is perturbed. Solar energy is anyway available for ion electric station keeping, with xenon storage enough until a tech upgrade is called for anyway. | |
| Dec 21, 2015 at 15:48 | comment | added | SE - stop firing the good guys | Also, a mirror in SML1 reflects light that is already going to hit Mars, in SML2 some of the light is blocked by Mars, and SML3,4,5 are too far away. | |
| Dec 21, 2015 at 15:42 | comment | added | SE - stop firing the good guys | I am totally aware of them, the reason I am asking is that the radiation pressure will totally change the conditions. | |
| Dec 21, 2015 at 15:31 | comment | added | James Jenkins | @Hohmannfan have you looked at the Lagrangian points of Mars? | |
| Dec 21, 2015 at 15:23 | comment | added | SE - stop firing the good guys | I am specifically not interested in orbiting mirrors, as they a large amount of the time have a bad solar angle. The Ringworld arrangement is more useful for sunshades than mirrors. I am however interested if you can tell me how the light-pressure alter orbital mirrors. | |
| Dec 21, 2015 at 15:16 | history | answered | James Jenkins | CC BY-SA 3.0 |