There’s a new breakthrough in space travel these days. It’s been just reported that a spaceship that could travel 3.6 million miles per day has been successfully tested in Earth Orbit.
According to the latest reports coming from Express.co.uk, the spacecraft is called The Lightsail 2.
This craft is an experiment that has been built in order to prove the practical application of a controlled “solar sail.”
Solar sailing
This spacecraft has the ability to far outstrip traditional rocket engines.
The revolutionary mission was launched back on June 25 and it has been developed by “The Planetary Society”, based in the US.
This voyage is extremely important because it managed to become the first-ever to demonstrate solar sailing and used energy from the Sun to orbit Earth.
The spaceship is really tiny and it measures just 10x10x30cm. This was powered with propelled sunlight bouncing off its mirrored sails.
“The exploitation used thin plastic sheets to gather the momentum from the Sun,” writes the online publication mentioned above.
The mission is groundbreaking
Bruce Betts LightSail program manager and the Planetary Society chief scientist Bill Nye hailed the groundbreaking mission.
Bill Nye said the mission was a “game-changer” for further space exploration.
He said: ”For The Planetary Society, this moment has been decades in the making. Carl Sagan talked about solar sailing when I was in his class in 1977. But the idea goes back at least to 1607, when Johannes Kepler noticed that comet tails must be created by energy from the Sun.”
Regarding space travel, previous studies revealed that space travel might cause some severe conditions in astronauts engaged in deep space journeys.
Surprisingly, a new study came out to say that space travel is not shortening astronauts’ lives.
Rada attended the courses in the Faculty of Letters, Romanian-English section, and finished the Faculty of Theatre and Television, Theatrical Journalism section, both within the framework of Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. Up ’til now, she reviewed books, movies, and theatre-plays, enjoying subjects from the cultural niche. Her experience in writing also intersects the IT niche, given the fact that she worked as a content editor for firms that produce software for mobile devices. She is collaborating with online advertising agencies, writing articles for several websites and blogs.
So it would still take 4500 years to get one light year (or to the closest system) ?
Yeah exactly. Big numbers sound cool but it’s actually still VERY slow. Ion bases propulsion offers much more then solar sail tech but this IS pretty cool. Just not the speed or distance part.
i wanna go to mars