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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

More information: Rhys Mackintosh et al, Poynting-Robertson damping of laser beam driven lightsails, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.16924 ...

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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 ...

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 ...

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 ...