Solar sails (also known as lightsails, light sails, and photon sails) are a method of spacecraft propulsion using radiation pressure exerted by sunlight...

A diffractive solar sail, or diffractive lightsail, is a type of solar sail which relies on diffraction instead of reflection for its propulsion. Current...

materials for optimizing a solar sail, for instance. Momentary or hours long solar pressures can indeed escalate due to release of solar flares and coronal mass...

radiation pressure, which aids in the calculation of a force on a solar sail. Solar irradiance is measured by satellites above Earth's atmosphere, and...

Syromyatnikov, who served as the project's lead engineer. Originally devised as a solar sail, Syromyatnikov pivoted to using the proposed hardware as a space mirror...

electric sail (also known as an electric solar wind sail or an E-sail) is a proposed form of spacecraft propulsion using the dynamic pressure of the solar wind...

LightSail is a project to demonstrate controlled solar sailing within low Earth orbit using a CubeSat. The project was developed by The Planetary Society...

allocated funding. A preliminary mission outline suggests the use of solar sails propelled by high energy lasers to increase propulsion. The proposed...

the solar sail concept, NanoSail-D became the first such powered satellite to orbit Earth. As of August 2017, NASA confirmed the Sunjammer solar sail project...

for a given solar sail's area. However, solar sails still need to be quite large compared to the satellite, which means useful solar sails must be deployed...