Video shows NASA's futuristic solar sail technology prototype. Like a sail on the ocean propels a boat with the wind, this space sail is meant to propel payloads by harnessing the pressure of sunlight ...

The Diffractive Solar Sailing project is now entering phase III trials under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which could eventually lead to probes that use solar radiation to ...

NASA’s getting set to launch the NanoSail-D next week, its first solar-sail powered spacecraft which catches photons like wind on a 10 square-meter sail made of a thin metallic polymer. The craft uses ...

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 ...

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 ...

1 Apr 2023, 09:03 UTC · By: Daniel Patrascu / A new approach in solar sail design may allow for a survey of the Sun's poles, NASA is backing the project through the NIAC program ...

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 ...

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 ...

Spirals of solar wind can spin off larger solar eruptions and disrupt Earth's magnetic field, yet they are too difficult to detect with our current single-location warning system, according to a new ...