Spacecraft outfitted with sails and propelled by the sun are no longer the stuff of science fiction or theoretical space missions. Now, a Rochester Institute of Technology researcher is taking solar ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Video shows NASA's futuristic solar sail technology prototype. Like a sail on the ocean propels a boat with the wind, this space ...

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The ribbon solar sail will be a solar sail design using a thin film strip embedded with diffractive gratings. It is a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) project. This configuration leverages ...

NASA has launched the latest attempt to test solar sail propulsion technology. The ACS3’s solar sail is made of a reflective polymer and is held by a boom made of carbon fiber composite material.

The burgeoning space industry and the technologies society increasingly relies on—electric grids, aviation and telecommunications—are all vulnerable to the same threat: space weather. Subscribe to our ...

A tiny spacecraft orbiting Earth appeared to successfully unfurl a solar sail Tuesday to test the potential of using only sunlight for propulsion, mission officials said. Deployment commands were sent ...

Spirals of solar wind can spin off larger solar eruptions and disrupt Earth's magnetic field, yet they are too difficult to detect with our current single-location warning system, according to a new ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. NASA's IMAP mission will give Earthlings a sort of early warning system when solar weather may affect satellites and global ...