How do you keep a solar sail stable?

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 ...

Scientists develop inexpensive method to produce E-sail tethers

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 ...

Riding the wave of a supernova to go interstellar

When it comes to the challenges posed by interstellar travel, there are no easy answers. The distances are immense, the amount of energy needed to make the journey is tremendous, and the time scales involved are (no pun!) ...

Flight by Light: Mission accomplished for LightSail 2

Mission accomplished: the Planetary Society announced Wednesday that its LightSail 2 spacecraft, which was launched last month, had successfully raised its orbit using only the power of photons from the Sun.

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