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Cosmos 1 Solar Sail Mission |
 | | The Cosmos 1 spacecraft is a seeming contradiction in terms of the varying sizes of its parts: Its eight fanlike sails, when fully opened in Earth orbit, are almost 100 feet across and encompass a total acreage of 6,415 square feet. |
 | | On Earth's surface, Cosmos 1 would be impossibly fragile to use as a sailing vessel, but in open space, when the gravity is negligible, the solar sail ship will be able to make many circuits of our globe and change its polar orbit altitude by hundreds of miles. |
 | | Cosmos 1 also carries a compact disc containing a "Letter to the Future" from Druyan, an essay on the history of solar sailing by Louis Friedman, the historic technical paper on the concept by F. Tsander, and several early science fiction stories about solar sails, including the famous "The Wind from the Sun" by Clarke. |
| www.coseti.org /cosmos1.htm (2244 words) |
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