NASA taps into the magic of diffraction to build solar sailing spacecraft

-

Sails have propelled earthlings across the seas for millennia, but NASA believes their future is off-world. The space agency has unveiled plans to develop a new solar sail system for a demonstration mission. Dubbed Diffractive Solar Sailing, the project won Phase III of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which supports visionary space technologies. Those picked for Phase III are the closest to becoming real — so a spacecraft powered by solar sails isn’t a quixotic prospect. Indeed, variations of the technique have already reaped results. In 2010, a Japanese probe called Ikaros became the first craft to successfully use the tech…

This story continues at The Next Web

Or just read more coverage about: NASA

from The Next Web https://ift.tt/QraBC8N

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Quantum physicists say time travelers don’t have to worry about the butterfly effect

-
Image
What if I told you all your favorite time-travel films and books were actually created by big tech in order to wrest control of the time-travel industry from the proletariat? Think about it. Back to the Future, The Terminator, The Time Machine, all of these stories share a central theme where traveling through time is a dangerous proposition that could destroy the very fabric of our reality. It’s called the butterfly effect. The big idea is that you’d step out of your time travel machine and accidentally step on a bug. Because this bug doesn’t exist… maybe a frog goes… This story continues at The Next Web from The Next Web https://ift.tt/2XfjPI6
Read more