Missions to the outer planets are an important and exciting part of NASA’s goals because these scarcely visited worlds, particularly the ice giants Neptune and Uranus, undoubtedly hold secrets about our solar system. Unlocking these discoveries will enable us to better understand Earth and the formation and evolution of our solar system and countless others. …
Limitless Space Institute is sponsoring student programs and giving away about $2 million every two years in grants for work towards enabling interstellar travel. They gave out nine grants. Limitless Space Institute is working with the Breakthrough Institute. Limitless Space Institute is led by Sonny White. Sonny White and his team is also working on …
Solar sails made out of extreme metamaterials, nanostructured and with some ceramics will be able to withstand over 1000 degrees celsius. They will reach slingshot within 2-5 solar radii of the sun, which is 2 to 4 times closer than the Parker solar probe. The solar sails should cost about $10 million per launch and …
Unlike a reflective solar sail, a sun-facing diffractive solar sail uses a component of force perpendicular to the sun line. This allows navigation without sacrificing the amount of solar power on the sail. The angular deviation of light from a diffractive film may be engineered to provide electronic, rather than mechanical, navigation protocols, e.g. by …
Understanding the beginnings of the Universe and life itself is NASA’s long term vision and one of humanities’ grand challenges. Missions to the edge of our solar system and to space between stars in our galaxy – the interstellar medium – are of a great promise to shed light on these questions. However, today’s deep …
$100 million has been put into the Breakthrough Starshot project to push a sail up to 20% the speed of light and send an unmanned probe to Alpha Centauri in about 20 years. There is progress on a stabilizing design for a sail to ride the laser beam. An optical beam rider making use of …
A Rochester Institute of Technology researcher could more than double the performance of solar sails by creating diffractive metafilm sails. This will initially be used to raise cubesats to higher orbits. The new materials could be used to steer reflected or transmitted photons for near-Earth, interplanetary and interstellar space travel. Diffractive metafilm sails could solve …
With composite booms, the NASA principal investigator believes we could make 1000 to 4000 square meter solar sails today with a funded project. Then with the learnings from that mission we could rapidly advance to 10,000 square meter solar sails. Les Johnson believes that he can see the development path to kilometer sails with a …