A Solar sail in the form of a propeller spun by radiation pressure from the Sun.

[imatfaal]

Let me try to give more detail as much as I can.

 

The gyroscope will consist of a fly wheel rotating about a shaft placed perpendicularly to the the spin center attached to the payload.

The payload is placed stationary at the center to prevent its avionics from getting damaged due to high accelerations.

 

The main reason am proposing this is we want to store enough angular momentum in the system so that we can transform it to linear momentum by ejecting the reaction mass to move the payload faster than currently possible. This is not possible with current solar sail designs because you always get pushed away before you get enough momentum.

 

You will get zero net angular momentum gain - by principle you need a torque about an axis to get a change in angular momentum about that axis; you can use counter-rotators which will have balancing and opposite ang moms - but no net angular momentum gain.

 

You will have a linear momentum gain away from the star purely due to radiative pressure - have you done any back of the envelope calcs to see if the velocity you can achieve thru your wizardry can overcome the velocity you will get thru radiative pressure?

 

NB - It is an urban myth that you can not use a propeller to driven by the wind to move into the wind; check out all the designs that do just that on youtube. Note the designs are very clever and not quite what you might imagine. So I would not immediately rule out your idea - but you gotta do sum sums

[Maximillian]

 

You will get zero net angular momentum gain - by principle you need a torque about an axis to get a change in angular momentum about that axis; you can use counter-rotators which will have balancing and opposite ang moms - but no net angular momentum gain.

 

You will have a linear momentum gain away from the star purely due to radiative pressure - have you done any back of the envelope calcs to see if the velocity you can achieve thru your wizardry can overcome the velocity you will get thru radiative pressure?

 

NB - It is an urban myth that you can not use a propeller to driven by the wind to move into the wind; check out all the designs that do just that on youtube. Note the designs are very clever and not quite what you might imagine. So I would not immediately rule out your idea - but you gotta do sum sums

I didn't rule out the backward push on the spacecraft, a solar sail can simply be used to slow down the orbit to return the system closer to the Sun.