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 ...

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 ...

As NASA’s exploration continues to push boundaries, a new solar sail concept selected by the agency for development toward a demonstration mission could carry science to new destinations. The ...

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 ...

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 ...

Despite a failed first attempt, NASA deployed its pioneering solar sail system, which will harness energy from the Sun to propel itself forward through space. The Advanced Composite Solar Sail System ...

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 ...

On April 23, NASA launched a solar sail protype to orbit around our planet — a piece of technology that could very well revolutionize the way we think about spacecraft propulsion. Then, on Aug. 29, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Solar sails rely upon pressure exerted by sunlight on large surfaces. Get the sail closer to the sun and, not surprisingly, efficiency increases. A proposed new mission called Mercury Scout aims to ...