Interstellar travel has long been a dream, but getting to the stars is incredibly difficult. A new project is bringing the space community closer to realizing this dream. The Breakthrough Starshot ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The Christian Science Church, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The Church publishes the Monitor ...

The Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 is a winner of the 2024 Gizmodo Science Fair for testing the feasibility of using photons from the Sun as a form of propulsion for satellites. Can solar sailing ...

Traveling the vast distances between solar systems is well beyond existing technology. But a new ultra-thin lightsail designed with AI could make it possible to reach the nearest star within 20 years.

The Planetary Society today announced the first of its LightSail spacecraft will embark on a May 2015 test flight. Funded entirely by private citizens, the solar sail satellite will hitch a ride to ...

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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 ...

Sailing across the cosmos is finally becoming a reality. S Shannon Stirone Follow For centuries, it has been a dream: traveling through space powered only by the solar wind. It was first imagined in ...

To get somewhere in space, you'll need engines and fuel, but maybe that won't be the case for much longer. The Planetary Society has just reached a critical milestone in the development of its solar ...

Bill Nye's solar particle-powered spacecraft, LightSail, has lost communication with Earth. The spacecraft launched a week ago, but a software glitch has removed the craft's ability to send data back ...

The 46-year-old probe, which flew by Jupiter and Saturn in its youth and inspired earthlings with images of the planet as a “Pale Blue Dot,” hasn’t sent usable data from interstellar space in months.

That budgetary change aligns with the priorities of Elon Musk, who founded his SpaceX rocket company two decades ago with dreams of one day sending colonists to Mars. By Kenneth Chang The 46-year-old ...