Now that its reflective sail has deployed fully open in orbit, the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System can be seen in the night sky from many locations across the world!
Space Exploration
Sep 9, 2024
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Solar sails are an exciting way to travel through the solar system because they get their propulsion from the sun. NASA has developed several solar sails, and their newest, the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (or ACS3), ...
Space Exploration
Aug 30, 2024
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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 take advantage of this ...
Space Exploration
Mar 28, 2024
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Space travel has brought us to our next-door neighbor, the moon, and to the depths of our larger solar community inhabited by giants such as Saturn and Jupiter.
Can we build an enormous umbrella to dim the sun? Such a feat would be a megaproject on a scale like no other. It would take at least 400 dedicated rocket launches a year, for ten years (There have been 172 rocket launches ...
Planetary Sciences
Dec 12, 2022
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Solar sailing seems like a simple concept—instead of being pushed along by the wind, as in a typical sailing ship, a spacecraft can use highly reflective said to be pushed along simply by sunlight. But as with almost all ...
Space Exploration
Nov 4, 2022
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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.
Space Exploration
May 25, 2022
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Launching with the Artemis I uncrewed test flight, NASA's shoebox-size Near-Earth Asteroid Scout will chase down what will become the smallest asteroid ever to be visited by a spacecraft. It will get there by unfurling a ...
Astronomy
Jan 20, 2022
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Even after 30 months in space, The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 mission continues to successfully "sail on sunbeams," demonstrating solar sail technology in Earth orbit. The mission is providing hard data for future missions ...
Space Exploration
Nov 19, 2021
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Thin metallic tethers for Coulomb drag devices that tow satellites and spacecraft can now be produced more easily than before. Scientists of the Finnish Meteorological Institute have developed a method to produce multi-wire ...
Space Exploration
Mar 25, 2020
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