Solar Sail
-
The Planetary Society's LightSail CubeSat has phoned home. After being "paused" a over a week ago due to a software error, the Society reports that the solar sail technology demonstrator has now rebooted itself.
-
The LightSail solar sail mission has been "paused" due to a software glitch related to a design flaw in the avionics software, which has frozen the onboard computer in a fashion all too familiar to terrestrial technology users.
-
Getting to Mars is a difficult, long and costly journey. However, Finnish scientists may have a solution based on combining an electric solar sail invented in 2006 with fuel stations orbiting around Earth and the Red Planet.
-
The non-profit Planetary Society has announced that its LightSail spacecraft will make its first flight in May. The solar-propelled CubeSat will lift off as a piggyback cargo atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.
-
A team recently completed a milestone in preparation for the 2015 launch of the Sunjammer mission with the successful deployment a quarter panel of the spacecraft’s solar sail.
-
This month, the University of Helsinki and ESA will test a new space tether that has less chance of snapping under the stresses of operating in orbit.
-
NASA's Solar Sail Demonstration may launch as early as 2014, when it will send the largest solar sail yet built into orbit, to demonstrate the technical viability of the device.
-
An MIT graduate student proposes to use paintballs to deflect Earthbound asteroids.
-
Under NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, a JPL researcher has proposed the use of a pair of CubeSats for an autonomous mission to retrieve samples from Phobos, Mars' larger moon.
-
NASA is planning to demonstrate the largest solar sail ever built, in an upcoming space mission.
-
What looked like a failed mission has turned into an unexpected win for NASA with the successful deployment of the first-ever solar sail in low-Earth orbit.
-
The data clipper is a proposed solar-powered spacecraft that could map our solar system, and download the data to Earth.
Load More