An experimental NASA solar sail can be seen in the night sky as it orbits the Earth. NASA's Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) launched in April 2024 atop a Rocket Lab Electron rocket. The ...

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 ...

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 ...

April 22 (UPI) --NASA is gearing up for a launch this week that will test a new way to navigate the solar system, using a large sail to catch the sunlight. The Advanced Composite Solar Sail System is ...

A NASA-funded project is developing new technologies that would allow a spacecraft to fly through the cosmos propelled entirely with solar sails that "bend" light. The agency announced Tuesday that it ...

NASA plans to build larger solar sails that can generate more thrust. A new unique composite carbon fiber booms, the ACS3 system has the potential to support sails as large as 2,000 square meters, or ...

It takes a lot of power to get a spacecraft through Earth’s atmosphere and out of its gravity. But once a craft has reached orbit, it requires relatively little power to move through space. In fact, ...

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 ...

NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3), a dazzling spacecraft designed to make use of the tiny amounts of radiation pressure exerted by sunlight for propulsion, is still spinning through ...

A solar sail is designed to capture the tiny amounts of radiation pressure exerted by sunlight to propel a spacecraft to incredible speeds. The advantages are numerous: by acting like a sailing ship ...

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 ...