Years of computer simulations. Countless ground tests. They’ve all led up to now. The Planetary Society’s crowdfunded LightSail 2 spacecraft is successfully raising its orbit sol... Read more
Spacecraft outfitted with sails and propelled by the sun are no longer the stuff of science fiction or theoretical space missions. Now, a Rochester Institute of Technology researcher is taki... Read more
To sail on winds of sunlight has long been a dream of rocket scientists. The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that promotes space exploration, announced Monday that it would send the first of... Read more
This month, the University of Helsinki and the European Space Agency (ESA) will test a new space tether that has less chance of snapping under the stresses of operating in orbit. Installed a... Read more
An effective sail area that is as much as a million times bigger A sail formed not of material, but by electric fields reaching a diameter of 40 kilometers could tap the solar wind and prope... Read more
Free-flying satellites powered by the Sun soar through space. Two trials of spacecraft have successfully unfurled their solar sails, and demonstrated that radiation from sunlight can power t... Read more
Researchers from Washington State University have published a paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology stating that energy from solar winds could replace conventional forms of rene... Read more
Japanese scientists are celebrating the successful deployment of their solar sail, Ikaros. The 200-sq-m (2,100-sq-ft) membrane is attached to a small disc-shaped spacecraft that was put in o... Read more