Osage tribal member Eden Knapp presented her solar sails project at the United Nations headquarters in New York on July 28.
Ambassadors and scientists from across the world attended the meeting, hosted by the Ambassador to the UN from Equatorial Guinea, as well as the Permanent Representative of Water & Sanitation for Africa (WSA) to the UN, Dr. Nabhit Kapur.
“I was able to talk about my work this summer with my internship at Robonautics in partnership with the Earth Cup Initiative on how we can help mitigate the effects of climate change using technology from space called ‘solar sails,’” she wrote in a LinkedIn post. “They can act as sunshades to reflect sunlight away from the Earth, and therefore prevent the effects of climate change. This is especially useful when used in combination with cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
“I specifically discussed the development of the solar sails I have been making and how they would be highly accessible for universities and small groups to launch their involvement in space. It was super fun to see the joy on everyone’s faces when they got to hold the solar sail prototype I had developed.”
Knapp is a senior at Columbia University in New York City studying mechanical engineering with a minor in aerospace engineering and political science. Knapp has been interested in astronomy and other related fields since childhood.
“I’ve always been interested in the stars in the sky ever since I was a kid,” Knapp said.
Knapp has been designing solar sails this summer through her internship with Robonautics, an organization that is partnered with Earth Cup. According to NASA, solar sails use the pressure of sunlight for propulsion, angling toward or away from the Sun so that photons bounce off the reflective sail to push a spacecraft.
“I work on building the sails, as well as designing a backbone. Ideally our goal is to make it so other people and universities or nations, etc., can build their own version of it, but also our backbone, so that we can launch it. And I kind of just work on developing that specification and everything that goes into that.”
One of Knapp’s family friends and mentors, Earth Cup coordinator Michael McDonald, has been leading the project.
“He [McDonald] would talk about these solar sails and this project,” she said. “They hadn’t been built by this time; they had just been a concept. I was like, ‘This sounds like a really cool idea and I’d love to help out if there’s any need for it or if you need an engineer on your team.’”
Solar sails could change the future
Solar sails can travel quickly and have multiple uses.
“These solar sails can go,” Knapp said. “If they’re designed correctly, they can go up to 10 to 20% of the speed of light, which is faster than any chemical propulsion or rocket. It’s the fastest way to explore. And they also have such versatility; they can also be used to shield the earth from solar, and kind of help cool down the earth. They’re lightweight and there’s just so many applications they can be used for.”
Knapp uses 3-D modeling software to design and test the sails. The software also helps Knapp figure out what are the best materials to build the sails with.
“And then I run tests to see how they perform in different conditions such as thermal effects or maybe different forces acting on them and seeing what happens,” she said.
“Then the end of the goal, at the end of this is to have a specification sheet for other people to base sails off of,” Knapp said. “And hopefully we’d be able to launch a collective, but based off of the backbone design.”
How do the solar sails work?
“It’s very similar to a sail here that’d be in the water,” she said. “But instead of wind, this would be light. And light is composed of photons, small particles, smaller than atoms, and they have no mass. However, they have momentum.”
Light moves at 186,000 miles per second. The particles are moving so quickly that they bounce off the reflective material on the sail. The force from the impact of light bouncing off the sail causes it to be propelled. The source of light is continuous and helps the craft orbit for long periods.
“These photons are moving at the speed of light because they are what makes light,” Knapp said. “They’re hitting the sail at this really fast speed. And the sail is made of reflective material, so once it [light] bounces off, that pressure from where it’s hitting it and bouncing off, propels it forward.”
However, solar sails do not rely on solar wind; they rely on solar light. Solar wind is created by the outward expansion of charged particles from the Sun, whereas solar light is a form of electromagnetic radiation.
“A common misconception is that the solar sails rely on solar wind, but they actually do not,” Knapp said. “They rely on the photon pushing them. It’s a pretty reliable source since we can rely on sunlight kind of anywhere. If you’re trying to redirect it, you can potentially control it on the ground with a really high powered laser and hit the sail. But that’s kind of how it hits it and that’s how it propels.”
At some point, solar sails could become a new form of renewable energy, as they are environmentally friendly.
“You don’t have to have anything actually chemically powering them,” Knapp said. “Once they’re in space it’s cost and fuel efficient. And once they’re up there, you don’t have to provide anything else to them. But I think they definitely are the future just because of how fast they can go if they’re designed correctly. They’re cheaper to design because you save costs on fuel and they are smaller and have fewer parts.”
McDonald has high hopes for the solar sails. In addition to helping with climate change, they can be used as a tool to explore space. He added that the work Knapp is doing now will change how we explore space in the future.
“I can’t give you an exact date on this, but roughly within 15 years, we are likely to have races that will blow by Voyager,” he said.
Knapp created physical prototypes of the sails for the conference. The prototypes are similar to the actual solar sails, just smaller in size and made out of a different material than the sails being constructed in Maine, due to possibly damaging the sails when she traveled to the conference.
“They’re composed mainly of three parts,” Knapp said. “It’s the tubing, which acts as a frame, the membrane, which is the sail part, and then the nodes which kind of connect the tubes to each other. They’re really simple; they’re hexagon shaped and they’re about a meter in diameter, so they’re not huge, but that can be altered.”
Osage Nation Space Program
Knapp and McDonald said collaborators would also like to see involvement from Native American tribes on the project, including the Osage Nation.
“The plan would be if the Osage Nation wants to participate, the company could brand the Osage logo on the sails,” she said. “We want to do that with any group that wants to participate. They could get their logo on a solar sail if they want to have their name in space or establish a space program.”
McDonald said he hopes to expand the Osage Nation’s involvement into virtual education on different topics to educate Osage youth.
“What we would like to do is to educate Osage youth, from grammar school up, about what’s happening in terms of space activity,” he said. “And the environmental issues that are associated with our current knowledge about climate change and space and so on. Even at first to third grade, they could play this game; what we’re doing is structuring educational programs as a part of the Earth Cup that will be enabling students even by the time they get to junior high or high school, to actually start building spacecraft in the science technology and mathematics disciplines online, where they can actually build a spacecraft and then race it in space based upon their knowledge of the science and technology.”
Her father, Troy Knapp, said that she has always been creative.
“As a child, there was always an interest to build and create very strong interest in that,” he said. “As early as I can remember, she always wanted to build and create things using her hands and physically creating something new and building things.”
Ultimately, her interest in learning has shaped the future for her as a scientist.
“I’ve never really seen her influenced heavily by peer pressure and things,” Troy Knapp said. “She was an independent thinker and I think she learned at a young age also to do her own research. She was a sponge about observing things; I think that was a big change at that point to see her realize she would research and she’d learn, and she formed her own opinions. And with that, there was always an effort to do something that was going to make a difference and make the world a better place.”
Osages are from the stars
Eden said there’s a cultural aspect of being involved with creating tools to explore space.
“It’s like a full circle moment coming from the stars in the sky and then being led back down to Earth,” she said. “It’s kind of a full circle moment launching these sails and exploring the solar system as an Osage member myself.”
Knapp is President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers at Columbia, a C.P. Davis Scholar through the university, and serves as a resident adviser in her dorm. She was also a National Competition Finalist for NASA’s Micro-G programs, and traveled to Houston in June to present her research to the NASA Johnson Space Center’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab. In high school, she was a NASA STEM Enhancement Earth Sciences intern. She has also been recognized by the Center for Native American Youth Aspen Institute.
