Group items tagged

100 square feet;

NASA is, rather, testing the deployment mechanism.

In 2008, engineers were given just four months to devise a solar sail. They pulled it off, but the rocket carrying the sail experienced launch failure.

The NanoSailD is a solar sail designed to use light particles to accelerate. If all goes well it will be the first solar sail deployed by NASA.

It instead uses the sail for the humble but important mission of testing a potential orbit-cleaning tool.

a team reports studying the turbulent flow of solar wind particles by monitoring the accompanying waves of magnetic field. The team used a cluster of satellites to measure the field in unprecedented spatial detail. They found that the waves aren't equally strong in all directions but are larger in certain preferred directions, as theorists had predicted. The observation will help astrophysicists better understand the consequences of the solar wind, including its effect on the transmission of cosmic rays, particles that arrive at Earth from elsewhere in our galaxy.

Astronomers have discovered a whole new class of alien planet: a vast population of Jupiter-mass worlds that float through space without any discernible host star, a new study finds.

Sumi and his team looked at two years' worth of data from a telescope in New Zealand, which was monitoring 50 million Milky Way stars for microlensing events. They identified 474 such events, including 10 that lasted less than two days. The short duration of these 10 events indicated that the foreground object in each case was not a star but a planet roughly the mass of Jupiter. And the signals from their parent stars were nowhere to be found.