Sails & environmental fields
Work with the environment.
Sails and tethers use external photons, particles or fields. Their performance depends on the environment and the full architecture that completes the interaction.
Where is the energy and momentum partner, and when is it available?
Small Solar Power Sail Demonstrator 'IKAROS': Confirmation of Photon Acceleration
Reports orbit-determined solar-photon acceleration following sail deployment. JAXA gives an estimated sunlight-pressure thrust of 1.12 mN, providing a real example of travel without consuming onboard propellant for that force.
Electrodynamic Tethers for Spacecraft Propulsion
Explains the Lorentz force on a current-carrying tether in Earth's magnetic environment. It supplies a concrete example in which a mapped external field, an electrical circuit, and environmental coupling produce a calculable force.
The LightSail 2 Solar Sailing Mission Summary
The mission team reports controlled solar sailing in low Earth orbit, including sustained intervals of increased apogee and orbital energy. Its 32 m² sail and twice-per-orbit attitude maneuvers show that geometry, control, and photon momentum can produce useful propulsion together.
Update on NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System
NASA confirms successful deployment of the ACS3 booms and sail, while reporting a slight bend in one boom and a spacecraft still slowly tumbling at the time of this update. The report makes structural deployment, attitude control, energy management, and sail characterization visible as separate engineering achievements.
A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight
Lubin develops a directed-energy route to accelerating small probes using an external laser and a sail, transferring the heavy power system away from the spacecraft. It supplies a useful systems comparison for onboard-power limits, beam infrastructure, and the distinction between a projected architecture and demonstrated hardware.
Dynamically stable radiation pressure propulsion of flexible lightsails for interstellar exploration
A mesh-based multiphysics simulator couples elasticity, thermal behavior, optical scattering, and sail dynamics. The calculations identify spin-stabilized and nanophotonic membrane designs with promising shape and beam-riding stability, illustrating what a quantitatively specified geometric propulsion model should contain.
The TSS-1R Electrodynamic Tether Experiment: Scientific and Technological Results
The TSS-1R flight collected plasma-electrodynamic data during deployment of nearly 19.7 km of conducting tether. The results showed that orbital motion relative to the plasma must be included in current-collection models, grounding field-coupled spacecraft technology in a measured environmental interaction.
Invited Article: Electric solar wind sail: Toward test missions
The electric sail couples the electric potential of long conducting tethers to solar-wind particles, obtaining thrust by deflecting an external momentum stream. The paper describes the positively charged tether system, onboard electron gun, construction, navigation, and simulation work needed to make that concept testable.
NASA Begins Testing of Revolutionary E-Sail Technology
NASA describes HERTS laboratory tests intended to measure proton and electron interactions with a charged wire and improve electric-sail models. It explicitly identifies the external solar-wind momentum exchange as the source of proposed thrust, an accessible explanation for a public research atlas.