Scientists have proposed a rotating lightsail concept that can launch probes across interstellar distances. The name of the spacecraft, Torqued Accelerator using Radiation from the Sun (TARS) is ...

They believe lightsails must have the ability to "billow" and form a curved shape kind of like a parachute. Both the sail's length and the radius of curvature, Bargatin explains, should be about 3 ...

New lightsails could help cut space travel time from millennia to decades Researchers from Brown created more efficient lightsails, which are thin membranes that can be accelerated by light. Richard ...

Mar 27, 2025 A new nanomaterial to make lightsails for interstellar travel In a potential step toward sending small spacecraft to the stars, researchers have developed an ultra-thin, ultra-reflective ...

How can lightsail technology advance to help humanity travel to other star systems? This is what a recent study published in Nature Communications hopes to address as an international team of ...

Reflective lightsails need to collect and redirect solar rays, which means they have to be coated in a metal-like film and must always face the direction of the sun.

Diffractive lightsails, by comparison, employ tiny grates on the sail material to diffract light in all directions. As NASA says, this will allow spacecraft to “make more efficient use of ...

Chemical rockets are loud, noisy and can only get us so far. If we want to reach another star system, we’ll need something better—either super energy-dense fuel to improve the efficiency of chemical ...

Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology ...

It’s a long way to the nearest star, which means conventional rockets won’t get us there. The fuel requirements would make our ship prohibitively heavy. So an alternative is to travel light. Literally ...

More information: Rhys Mackintosh et al, Poynting-Robertson damping of laser beam driven lightsails, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.16924 Provided by Universe Today ...