Displaying items by tag: solar sail

NanoSail-D2 is a technology demonstration experiment of NASA with the primary objective to deploy a compact solar sail boom system in space.

In a previous attempt, a team from the NASA/MSFC, along with a team from the NASA/ARC (Ames Research Center), developed a solar sail mission called NanoSail-D which was lost in a launch failure aboard a Falcon 1 rocket on August 3, 2008.

Two units of the NanoSail-D satellites have been built. NASA/MSFC plans to launch the backup NanoSail-D payload from a 3U CubeSat (nanosatellite) of ARC on the FASTSat-HSV mission. FASTSat is required to launch the nanosatellite before the NanoSail-D2 payload can be launched and deployed from the nanosatellite.

Sunjammer is a solar sail constructed by LGarde for NASA.

It is the largest solar sail to be constructed as of 2013. Sunjammer is slated to launch in November 2014 as the secondary payload of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, along with the Earth observation satellite DSCOVR.

Sunjammer was named after a 1964 Arthur C. Clarke story of the same name, in which several solar sails compete in a race across the Solar System.