Displaying items by tag: ARES Institute

Aerospace Research & Engineering Systems Institute, Inc. (ARES Institute) is an American  501 (c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit organization  founded to promote space exploration and STEM education through hands-on research projects involving industry and students of all ages. Our mission includes public outreach through media activities, including our flagship publication, Zero-G News.

ARES Institute came to life in 2003 in the wake of the Columbia accident and recognition of the need to increase public support for space exploration as well as STEM education in America’s schools. One of the ways we do this is by creating unique projects utilizing nanosatellite technologies to design and build hardware and experiments that may actually fly in space.

Currently (Oct. 2013), we are working on a project we have named “LunarSail”. 

LunarSail is a cubesat-based space mission established by the Aerospace Research & Engineering Systems Institute, Inc. (ARES Institute).

LunarSail is designed to use a solar sail to propel a small spacecraft from Earth orbit onto a lunar orbit rendezvous trajectory and execute orbital insertion around the Moon.  A primary objective of the LunarSail mission is to serve as a testbed for cubesat operations beyond low Earth orbit and applications requiring cislunar or interplanetary rendezvous. It is a proposed cubesat mission intended to demonstrate practical application of solar sail technology for propulsion, trajectory/attitude control and rendezvous with another body in space. With LunarSail, we will take advantage of the cubesat platform to conduct a first of its kind mission to use a solar sail to send a spacecraft to the Moon and then utilize the sail's unique characteristics to navigate into lunar orbit.

LunarSail will be the first solar sail to enter Lunar orbit. The first crowdsourced mission to cislunar space.