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Before man can cross the vast distances of space, the designs of spacecraft’s sails will be key – striking a delicate balance between mass, strength in addition to reflectivity. Working with NASA, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientists have created the fresh material out of silicon in addition to its oxide, silica. The team has figured out that will super-thin structures made of This specific composite can transform infrared light waves into a momentum that will would likely accelerate a probe to 134,000,000 mph. Speeds like This specific can carry a little probe to our closest stellar neighbours, a huddle...

Just as boats can be powered using sails that catch the wind, spacecraft may someday be powered by solar sails. How would this work? Remember, the Sun blasts out radiation all the time. Radiation includes the kind of light you can see and other kinds of light you cannot see. Radiation that strikes a large, shiny, sail-like structure pushes on it, much as the wind pushes on a sail. Although the push is very gentle, it is constant. Over time, the spacecraft can get going very, very fast, using no fuel at all!

Carbon nanotubes are like minute bits of string, and untold trillions of these invisible strings must be assembled to make useful macroscopic articles that can exploit the phenomenal mechanical and electronic properties of the individual nanotubes. In the Aug. 19 issue of the prestigious journal Science, scientists from the NanoTech Institute at UTD and a collaborator, Dr. Ken Atkinson from Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), a national laboratory in Australia, report such assembly of nanotubes into sheets at commercially useable rates. Starting from chemically grown, self-assembled structures in which nanotubes are aligned like trees in a forest, the...

MOSCOW, June 16 (RIA Novosti) - The Solar Sail spacecraft designed at the Lavochkin Science and Production Association and sponsored by Cosmos Studios of the United States, is scheduled for lift off June 21, Trud, a daily, reported. The Sail, the first space yacht in history, will be launched 840-km into orbit by Russia's Volna (Wave) three-stage launch vehicle, a converted SS-N-18 Stingray ballistic missile. The rocket will be launched from a Kalmar (Delta-3)-class SSBN (Strategic Submarine Ballistic Nuclear) in the Barents Sea. This advanced spacecraft weighs just 110 kg. Its folded solar sail consists of eight triangular "petals", which...

SANDUSKY, Ohio - Scientists working with a synthetic material 100-times thinner than a piece of paper are testing their theory that the sun can power interplanetary spacecraft. They believe that streams of solar energy particles called photons can push a giant, reflecting sail through space the way wind pushes sailboats across water.

A small budget and big dreams make for a heady mix. But solar-sail pioneer Lou Friedman is ready for anything as spacecraft Cosmos 1 prepares to take on the Sun and the space agencies. Tony Reichhardt reports. This is a story about patience. Not just one man's patience, although Lou Friedman has waited half his life to get a solar sail into space. Futurists, too, have been dreaming about this technology for nearly a century and have yet to see it demonstrated. In April, if all goes to plan, a 600-square-metre Mylar sail called Cosmos 1, which looks more like...

Gregory Benford of the University of California, Irvine, and his brother James, who runs aerospace research firm Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, California, envisage beaming microwave energy up from Earth to boil off volatile molecules from a specially formulated paint applied to the sail. The recoil of the molecules as they streamed off the sail would give it a significant kick that would help the craft on its way. "It's a different way of thinking about propulsion," Gregory Benford says. "We leave the engine on the ground." Solar sails are in essence nothing more than giant mirrors. Photons of light from...