NASA has selected a fascinating new project for further development, known as the Diffractive Solar Sail. By bending light before it hits the sail, this device could propel spacecraft more efficiently ...

Over the last two decades, Les Johnson and his team of engineers have quietly been pushing NASA into a new era of space exploration while nobody was paying attention. As an engineer at the legendary ...

The ribbon solar sail will be a solar sail design using a thin film strip embedded with diffractive gratings. It is a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) project. This configuration leverages ...

More than four months after launching to space, a solar-sailing spacecraft has successfully spread its wings above our planet. Just like the wind guides a sailboat on the water, it only takes a slight ...

Depending on the mission they've been created to fulfill spacecraft can be powered by a variety of technologies. Presently, the most widespread is the one that uses propellant and rocket engines. But ...

Nasa has unfurled a solar sail in space for the first time, aiming to harness the propulsive power of sunlight for interstellar travel. The US space agency revealed that it had deployed the solar sail ...

A project to develop diffractive solar sails has advanced to the third and final phase of NASA’s advanced concepts program. The team behind the project now has two years to further develop this ...

In the frozen outskirts of the solar system, a reddish dwarf planet orbits in silence. Known as Sedna, it is so distant that one trip around the Sun takes more than 11,000 years. For much of that time ...

A variety of sailcraft missions are in the works. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Solar sailing can be a relatively slow-motion ...

NASA is gearing up to launch an advanced solar sail spacecraft later this month. Using a new boom made of lightweight polymer composites, the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System is scheduled to lift ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. How do you design a sail that can get a spacecraft to another solar system? NASA's Voyager 1 and ...

Illustration of a solar sail above the Earth. Researchers have proposed using a lightweight sail propelled by laser light to go to another star system. A sailboat moves forward when the wind blows up ...