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 ...

Lightsails Can Carry Us Into Space, and Clear It Out Too The force of sunlight could push humanity into space and help clean the junk in orbit above us out, so that it doesn't trap us on Earth.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In a potential step toward sending small spacecraft to the stars, researchers have developed an ultra-thin, ultra-reflective membrane designed to ride a column of laser light to incredible speeds.

The idea of traveling through interstellar space using spacecraft propelled by ultrathin sails may sound like the stuff of sci-fi novels. But in fact, a program started in 2016 by Stephen Hawking ...

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 ...