The ribbon solar sail will be a solar sail design using a thin film strip embedded with diffractive gratings. It is a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) project. This configuration leverages diffraction to cancel out normal photonic pressure components, allowing thrust to align along the ribbon’s length when oriented at a tilt to incoming sunlight. …
We need to make bigger solar sails from materials that can take high temperatures. Taking high temperatures means the solar sails could fly closer to the sun. If we got four times closer to the sun than Mercury (9 million miles or so )then we could go 20AU per year which is about 3 times …
NASA plans to build larger solar sails that can generate more thrust. A new unique composite carbon fiber booms, the ACS3 system has the potential to support sails as large as 2,000 square meters, or about 21,500 square feet, or about half the area of a soccer field. The ACS3 system has been in low …
Brian Wang and Randy Kirk have another video weekly review of the big stories in science, this episode takes a deep dive into the AI compute and the ramifications of the huge increases in compute that will be required. There is also more news out on the LK99 room temperature super conductor, and that is …
Researchers at Delft University of Technology, led by assistant professor Richard Norte, have unveiled a remarkable new material with potential to impact the world of material science: amorphous silicon carbide (a-SiC). Beyond its exceptional strength, this material demonstrates mechanical properties crucial for vibration isolation on a microchip. Amorphous silicon carbide is therefore particularly suitable for …
Tiny gram-scale interstellar probes pushed by laser light are likely to be the only technology capable of reaching another star this century and a NASA NIAC phase 1 study wants to work out the additional issues to coordinate several thousands one gram solar sails into a coordinated mission that can communicate back to Earth from …
Earth orbiting satellites have the speed to counter the Earth’s gravity. The mean orbital velocity needed to maintain a stable low Earth orbit is about 7.8 km/s (4.8 mi/s), which translates to 28,000 km/h (17,000 mph). However, this depends on the exact altitude of the orbit. A statite, or static satellite, would use a solar …
New research indicates that tens to hundreds of planet-sized nomadic worlds may populate the spherical volume centered on Earth and circumscribed by Proxima Centauri, and thus may comprise closer interstellar targets than any stellar planetary system. For the first time, there is systematic analysis of the feasibility of exploring these unbounded celestial bodies via deep …
A NASA NIAC phase 2 is developing Titanium Nitride solar sails that would be able to perform an extremely close flyby of the sun to achieve speeds of 60 AU per year. This would be over 15 times faster than the Voyager (3.6 AU per year) spacecraft. They need to make metamaterial layers to achieve …
The Limitless Space Institute is reviewing the work of Interstellar grant recipients. It is feasible but very difficult to make a laser pushed sail reach 20% of the speed of light. The general parameters are for an array of lasers with 100 Gigawatts of power to push a 1 gram solar sail that has 4 …
Solar sails allow a low cost pathway to high speed and ubiquitous exploration of the outer solar system and interstellar space. A slingshot maneuver ~2-5 solar radii distant from the sun can propel light-weight cubesat class spacecraft to near-relativistic speeds. They can reach 0.1% of the speed of light (over 300 km/s or restated as …