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 ...
Solar sails represent one of the most elegant concepts in space exploration: using sunlight itself to propel spacecraft through the cosmos without any fuel. But these thin, light giants face a ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
On May 21, 2010, Japan launched the first solar sail into space. Solar sail technology uses light for spacecraft propulsion, but not in the same way that traditional solar panels do. While solar ...
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti, University of Michigan (THE CONVERSATION) The burgeoning space ...