solar sail

A saillike device made of lightweight reflective material, attached to a spacecraft to harness the radiation pressure of the sun's light and solar wind for propulsion. Also called light sail.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

solar sail

(Aeronautics) a device that reflects light particles from the sun, gaining momentum in the opposite direction to propel spacecraft forwards

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

Translations

voile solaire

Mentioned in

light sail

References in periodicals archive

the one that looks doable in the next 10 years is the solar sail."

Travelin' Light

The other satellite, developed by Spacety (Changsha), a privately owned Chinese commercial space company, will be used to test solar sail technology.

China's KZ-1A rocket launches two satellites

A nearly 18,000-square-foot solar sail would demonstrate the ability to use solar radiation as a propulsion system.

NASA Selects Proposals to Demonstrate SmallSat Technologies to Study Interplanetary Space

Some researchers thought it was possible that the object was an alien solar sail, relying on the sun's light to push it through space.

Mystery space object probably not aliens

The second big challenge is the solar sail. While the concept has been around for decades, it wasn't successfully deployed until 2010, when Japan's Ikaros spacecraft tested a sail 14 meters (46 feet) square during its mission around the sun.

Next stop: Alpha Centauri: Shooting tiny spacecraft to other stars requires audacious thinking and technological progress--but Breakthrough Starshot's backers say it is just a matter of time

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