Alabama—the birthplace of the Saturn V rocket that first took humans to the Moon—Johnson led the complex design of a 17,780-square-foot sail that will push spaceships across the solar system ...

This mission, developed by the Shenyang Institute of Automation, successfully demonstrated the deployment of a solar sail in low Earth orbit. The design of SIASAIL-I includes a compact deployment ...

And we believe it will fundamentally advance the technology of spaceflight. Solar sailing is elegant not only in concept but also in its efficiency. Once in orbit, there’s no fuel needed.

But more importantly, the mission design would give humanity 100 minutes of warning for fast-moving solar storms, and a large solar sail would entirely control the mission. Current warning times ...

attitude and temperature and fewer computing resources with effective and accurate subsystems. The integrated system proposed in this paper can be applied to solar sail design, operation, and mission ...