Lightsails are ultra-thin, reflective structures that use laser-driven radiation pressure to propel spacecraft at high speeds. Unlike conventional nanotechnology, which miniaturizes devices in all ...

The concept is to use lasers to propel miniature space probes attached to "lightsails" to reach ultrafast speeds and ...

A team of scientists has made the first experimental measurements of laser-induced motions of miniature lightsails in the lab. The idea of traveling through interstellar space using spacecraft ...

Lightsails have the potential to reduce flight time to nearby stars from several thousand years using current propulsion systems to perhaps just a decade or two. Now, a team of researchers from ...

In a Nature Communications article published in late March, researchers announced that they had created a more efficient way to design and manufacture lightsails — light-reflecting, lightweight ...

That said, going deep into space isn’t the only way lightsails might be useful for human explorers. Lightsails could also be used to clean up space, which is the main way that the European Space ...

Can lightsails be the future of deep space exploration? This is what a recent study published in Nature Photonics hopes to address as a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology ...

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Unlike a reflective solar sail, a sun-facing diffractive solar sail uses a component of force perpendicular to the sun line. This allows navigation without sacrificing the amount of solar power on the ...

Get Instant Summarized Text (Gist) Scalable nanotechnology-based lightsails have been developed, offering significant advancements in space exploration and experimental physics. These ultra-thin ...