It is designed to be smaller than a loaf of bread. Folded tightly inside are four sails of shiny Mylar, the stuff balloons are made of. "They deploy from this little box to a thing bigger than ...

Solar sails are huge, extremely thin sheets of reinforced, aluminized Mylar that act as mirrors and are pushed gently by the force of the sun. When photons, or particles of light, hit an object ...

The small little box holds 32 square meters of mylar, which will unfold to create solar sails, designed to glide on energy from solar radiation in the same manner that a sailboat is powered by wind.

Last year, the society’s solar sailing spacecraft, LightSail, proved it could deploy a set of silvery Mylar sails in the vacuum of space. Next year, LightSail 2 will prove to the world that ...

The fascinating design has been successfully tested on Earth, but now it's going to be launched to the upper atmosphere to test the deployment of its huge mylar sails in flight. Solar sail ...

The sails, made of a lightweight polyester Mylar material, are heat molded – a patented process that has dominated sail design in the costly world of racing. The technology is called 3DL ...

The fascinating design has been successfully tested on Earth, but now it's going to be launched to the upper atmosphere to test the deployment of its huge mylar sails in flight. Solar sail ...