Improved Solar Sail

The conventional means of collecting and redirecting solar sail light uses a metal-coated polyimide film but this is sub-optimal and unstable because the very large and very thin sail must be rapidly slewed away from the sun line for navigational purposes. Stability rigging and attitude control devices add mass to the sailcraft, thereby reducing the …

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Power for Interstellar Fly By

The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts funded a phase 1 study by Geoffrey Landis for power interstellar fly-by probes. Launching ultra-miniature probes to fly past an exoplanet a nearby star using a laser-pushed sail is now being seriously discussed as a mission, primarily by the “Breakthrough Starshot” program. Breakthrough Starshot has US$100 million to initialize research. …

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Graphene Still Difficult to Use and Path to Major Commercialization is Uncertain

Graphene has a lot of potential because it can be the strongest material and has many other exceptional characteristics. There has been a lot of research around the material since 2004, when Professor Sir Andre Geim and Professor Sir Kostya Novoselov of the University of Manchester discovered and isolated a single atomic layer of carbon …

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