IKAROS
NASA’s New Solar Sail Has Launched and Will Soon Deploy
Solar Sails are an enigmatic and majestic way to travel across the gulf of space. Drawing an analogy to the…
NASA Tests a Solar Sail Segment of its Enormous Solar Cruiser Mission
A team led by NASA Marshall was selected to build a technology demonstrator called the Solar Cruiser to mature solar…
A Small Satellite With a Solar Sail Could Catch up With an Interstellar Object
When Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever observed passing through the Solar System, was discovered in 2017, it exhibited some…
LightSail 2 Has Now Been in Space for 2 Years, and Should Last Even Longer Before Re-Entering the Atmosphere
The Planetary Society's crowdfunded solar-sailing CubeSat, LightSail 2, launched on June 25th 2019, and two years later the mission is…
Want the Fastest Solar Sail? Drop it Into the Sun First
A new study from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy shows how a "Sun Diver," a light sail that dives…
Hunting LightSail in Orbit
The hunt is on in the satellite tracking community, as the U.S. Air Force’s super-secret X-37B space plane rocketed into…
Huge Solar Sail Portion Unfurls In Crucial Ground Test
We're sure the people in that picture above must have had sweaty hands as they unfurled a huge solar sail…
Separation Camera Takes Full Images and ‘Movie’ of IKAROS Solar Sail
[/caption] Two small "separation cameras" were ejected from JAXA's (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) IKAROS solar sail, which successfully took some…
Japanese Solar Sail Deploys Successfully
[/caption] New images and data from the IKAROS solar sail show the thin solar film has deployed and expanded successfully…
Japan’s Venus Orbiter and Solar Sail Missions Launch Successfully
Japan's first robotic mission to Venus and an experimental solar sail launched successfully from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern…