Lasers could one day steer solar sails and adjust a satellite's position in outer space, thanks to graphene. An experiment on ...

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This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The burgeoning space industry and the technologies ...

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 ...

The planet Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, and also the most difficult for spacecraft to visit and explore. This is ...

Space exploration has always been constrained by one fundamental issue: the need for fuel. Traditional rockets require vast amounts of propellant, which limits their range and the scope of their ...

Engineers in California pressed a button on Tuesday that unfurled the sails on a satellite that can be steered around Earth, advancing long-held hopes for an inexhaustible form of spaceflight and ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

An historical introduction to space propulsion -- The rocket : how it works in space -- Rocket problems and limitations -- Non-rocket in-space propulsion -- The solar-sail option : from the oceans to ...