Lightsails represent a unique approach to nanotechnology, focusing on extreme thinness at a nanoscale level (1/1000th the thickness of a human hair) while simultaneously achieving large-scale ...

Researchers at TU Delft and Brown University have developed scalable nanotechnology-based lightsails that could support future advances in space exploration and experimental physics. Their ...

Lightsails could reach distant star systems Date: January 31, 2025 Source: California Institute of Technology Summary: A team of scientists has made the first experimental measurements of laser ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

INNOVATOR Q&A At Brown, engineers work on laser-powered lightsails that could make it to Mars in hours instead of months A highly reflective lightsail pushed by light energy in the same way ...

Lightsails are a more generic form of solar sail, in that they use radiation pressure from a light source to generate propulsion. Radiation pressure is the transfer of momentum from radiation ...

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 ...