Powered by laser light, this tiny sail lays the groundwork for future advances in lightsail technology and the potential for ...

Riding a beam of light, a lightsail mission could reach Proxima Centauri in a couple of decades. But while the idea is simple, the engineering challenges are significant, because, across decades ...

Traveling from one star to another is currently impossible to achieve within a human lifetime. But some projects are designing ways to propel payloads to the nearest star system (Alpha Centauri) using ...

NASA's tiny NanoSail-D craft deployed its sails in Earth orbit in late 2010, and LightSail-2, a mission operated by the nonprofit Planetary Society, followed suit in July 2019. NASA's Near-Earth ...