solar sail

1. Universe Today – LightSail 2 is Sending Home New Pictures of Earth LightSail 2, the brainchild of The Planetary Society, has gifted us two new gorgeous images of Earth. The small spacecraft is currently in orbit at about 720 …

In 2018 the Parker Solar Probe launched and plans to approach the Sun to within 8.5 solar radii (4 million miles) of its surface. This is seven times closer than any previous mission. Researchers think a new coating could allow …

Arxiv – Breakthrough Starshot is an initiative to prove ultra-fast light-driven nanocrafts, and lay the foundations for a first launch to Alpha Centauri within the next generation. Along the way, the project could generate important supplementary benefits to solar system …

There is a 49-page report that has updated analysis on sending a small probe towards the Alpha Centauri system in a 50 year total mission time traveling at an average cruise velocity of 10% of light speed. The Andromeda Study: …

The Planetary Society’s solar sailing CubeSat (Lightsail2) has been installed into a spring-loaded deployer, and that deployer was bolted to the Prox-1 spacecraft. It was a double integration; basically they put a box inside a box inside a box. Lightsail …

The South Korean K2 Black Panther tank development started in 1995 and cost $260 million. South Korea designed a tank that on paper appears to be at equal or better than the specifications of current NATO tanks. Mass production commenced …

Last fall Yale astronomer Tabetha (Tabby) Boyajian and colleagues posted a paper on an astronomy preprint server reporting a star (KIC 8462852) 1,480 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus had found fluctuations in the light coming from the otherwise ordinary …