Difference between revisions of "Solar sail news roundup for October 3, 2013"

Revision as of 14:30, 3 October 2013

It's been awhile since I posted on news in the world of solar sailing, so here's a list of stories that have come out in the past several months.

• The Sunjammer project successfully tested deployment of a sail quadrant at a L·Garde facility in Tustin, CA, on September 30th, 2013. This is one boom and one sail out of four that will make up the flight sail.
  • Students from the Palm Middle School Science, Technology, and Mathematics (STEM) program visited L'Garde and watched the deployment test.
  • News Coverage
    • Universe Today: Huge Solar Sail Portion Unfurls In Crucial Ground Test
    • Satnews: L'Garde Inc., Space Services Holdings + NASA—Sunjamming For Power (Technology—Sail)
• NBC News, September 23, 2013: Solar sail ships seen as best bet now to get us to interstellar space. Discussion with physicist and novelist Dr. Gregory Benford on interstellar travel. Project Forward of Icarus Interstellar continues the study of beamed sail propulsion to other stars.
  • Infographic on interstellar sailing
• The IKAROS sailcraft is still alive and orbiting the sun with occasional radio beacon contacts with the ground.
  • English translation of IKAROS blog posts:
    • IKAROS Daily Report - August 29th, 2013
    • IKAROS Daily Report - August 22nd, 2013
• The CubeSail project and UltraSail concept of UIUC and CU Aerospace were featured in NASA Tech Briefs on September 1st, 2013: UltraSail CubeSat Solar Sail Flight Experiment.
• The Third International Symposium on Solar Sailing was held on June 11-13th, 2013, at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland.

--Ben (talk) 14:30, 3 October 2013 (EDT)