The mission is designed to test solar sail technology to help NASA develop larger spacecraft in the future using this ...

Instead, it would literally fall into the sun. To stay in such an orbit, a spacecraft would need another constant outward force. A solar sail could provide that continuous push, and the ...

It works similarly to how wind pushes against a sail on a boat. So too can sunlight push against a spacecraft to propel it through space. Incidentally, we call these spacecraft solar sails.

From astronauts getting stranded on a leaking ISS and faceplanting moon landers to injured Mars robots and a tumbling solar sail, here are 10 of the biggest space exploration mishaps in 2024.

Traveling from one star to another is currently impossible to achieve within a human lifetime. But some projects are ...

Novelists, poets, and scientists have envisioned spacecraft powered by solar sails since the 1600s. But now this fanciful concept is actually entering into reality.

Construction of a giant celestial solar farm is underway in China, with a scale comparable to creating a "Three Gorges Dam project above the Earth". The solar farm, which would be launched into ...

Over millions of years, that atmosphere escaped into space. Pluto is the only place in the solar system where we ... a symbolic envoy that will sail by Pluto and head farther into the Kuiper ...

General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) has successfully tested the nuclear fuel that may one day propel and power the spacecraft of the future. The trials verify that the fuel can survive ...