January 2017
New oceans beckon for solar sail technology
...to it, to higher and higher speeds. And it can do so without the use of any fuel. It is a common misperception that solar sails use the solar wind for propulsion - this is incorrect This last point is hugely significant. Given that launching anything...
17 December 2018
Innovative mission to view the surface of exoplanets using small sats
...The array of detectors – the small sats – will use solar sails to slingshot themselves around the Sun at speeds of over ... would need to be under 10 kilograms to make use of a solar sail to achieve the needed velocity, and they would need to travel so...
October 2015
Russian business: a long road to the stars for private space initiative
.... They made a proposal to the Russian gas industry to light up the northern territories with a cosmic mirror based on solar sail technologies. The gas people didn’t take an interest in the mirror, but they were interested in satellite communication...
February 2016
Searching for water in the Solar System
...abundance of volatile-rich planetesimals migrated from the outer Solar System (ie, beyond Jupiter). Observations of increasing abundance ...JAXA is even proposing an ambitious mission with a solar-sail spacecraft that would perform a sample return from ...
August 2017
Big science from small spacecraft
... to use ‘green’ propulsion. Another project under development is the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, which will deploy a solar sail that catches sunlight to steer a flight path taking it from a lunar trajectory to a rendezvous with a Near-Earth Asteroid...
April 2019
Cleaning up space
... debris capture and removal. In recent years, in-orbit testing has been carried out using electrodynamic tethers, solar sails, nets and harpoons. Astroscale has chosen a magnetic capture method, which it will test on its first technology...
