Nasa to fund novel diffractive solar sails

NASA announced it is providing RIT Professor Grover Swartzlander a Phase II award through its NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program to explore the feasibility of diffractive solar sails over the next two years. He estimates that it would take five years for spacecraft using diffractive solar sails to reach the poles of the sun and hopes to see a demonstration mission within the next five years to see how the diffractive solar sails would perform in space. Several space-based missions have demonstrated solar sail technology in space and NASA’s Near-Earth Asteroid Scout (NEA Scout) mission is expected to be the first operational mission to use a reflective solar sail.

Source: www.rit.edu