Lightsails Can Carry Us Into Space, and Clear It Out Too The force of sunlight could push humanity into space and help clean the junk in orbit above us out, so that it doesn't trap us on Earth.

New lightsails could help cut space travel time from millennia to decades Researchers from Brown created more efficient lightsails, which are thin membranes that can be accelerated by light. Richard ...

Lightsails aren't all that different. "When the photons hit our lightsail, they get reflected and they also create pressure," Bargatin said.

Reflective lightsails need to collect and redirect solar rays, which means they have to be coated in a metal-like film and must always face the direction of the sun.

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 Brown ...

Diffractive Lightsails. September 23, 2020 by Brian Wang. Unlike a reflective solar sail, a sun-facing diffractive solar sail uses a component of force perpendicular to the sun line. This allows ...

Diffractive lightsails, by comparison, employ tiny grates on the sail material to diffract light in all directions. As NASA says, this will allow spacecraft to “make more efficient use of ...

How can lightsail technology advance to help humanity travel to other star systems? This is what a recent study published in Nature Communications hopes to address as an international team of ...

Photonic Lightsails Our Best Shot at Reaching Another Star . Mark Thompson Universe Today March 1, 2025 Andrzej Mirecki Chemical rockets are loud, noisy and can only get us so far. If we want to reach ...

How Could Laser-Driven Lightsails Remain Stable? Brian Koberlein Universe Today February 5, 2024 The Planetary Society via AP It’s a long way to the nearest star, which means conventional rockets ...

It's a long way to the nearest star, which means conventional rockets won't get us there. The fuel requirements would make our ship prohibitively heavy. So an alternative is to travel light.