Matloff and Joseph Meany conceptualize a large solar sail made of aerographite which would only use the Sun to power a long term interstellar mission. It is based on an inflatable, hollow-body sail.

Materials exist today which can be used to make solar sails good enough to become solar sail sun satellites. Those solar sail satellites can be deployed to wait around the sun for interstellar objects ...

The burgeoning space industry and the technologies society increasingly relies on – electric grids, aviation and telecommunications – are all vulnerable to the same threat: space weather. Space ...

Turns out, it's as tough to drop inward into the inner solar system, as it is to head outward. The problem stems from losing momentum from a launch starting point on Earth. It can take missions ...

HOUSTON—After an attitude control system check delay, The Planetary Society reported a successful July 23 deployment of the Light Sail-2 (LS-2) mission spacecraft’s 344-sq.-ft. Mylar solar sail. It ...

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 ...

A sunlight-propelled satellite floating though space on huge metallic sails sounds like an idea straight from science fiction. But scientists at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia have ...

Engineers in California pressed a button on Tuesday that unfurled the sails on a satellite that can be steered around Earth, advancing long-held hopes for an inexhaustible form of spaceflight and ...

A giant solar sail recently unfurled by Nasa has been spotted “tumbling” through space. Astronomers captured the 80-square-metre object, which was unfurled last week, appearing to fluctuate in ...

For a number of years now NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program has been the driving force behind some of space exploration’s craziest, most spectacular, and daring ideas born in the ...

Nearly a week after launching to space, a microwave-sized cubesat phoned home for the first time as it prepares to embark on its mission of sailing through low Earth orbit. NASA’s Advanced Composite ...

NASA’s experimental solar sail is ready to take flight in Earth orbit, using the pressure of sunlight to test a new way of propulsion through the cosmos. The Advanced Composite Solar Sail System(ACS3) ...