Hundreds of years ago humans set out to explore the distant horizon carried by the wind on their sail. Today scientists are using this same concept, except they are concieving their ideas with much faster velocities in mind. Recently a project carried out by the former Soviet Union attempted to test the idea of a solar sail in low earth orbit. More recently the Planetary society teamed up with Russia to launch an actual solar sail test. Unfortunately the sail failed to deploy. Their project called Cosmos 1 is still ongoing. Beamed energy propulsion relies on an "external engine", or more frankly, a lasar, or the sun to push the spacecraft as it sails into the interstellar horizon, thus keeping the heavy propulsion system at home, creating a much more efficient system for transportation. Theoretically this concept yields ship velocity greater than 10% of the speed of light (.1c)* and is therefore considered applicable to interstellar missions.
A light sail utilizes energy from the sun or a lasar to push an ultra thin carbon mesh sail at at great speeds out of the solar system. Such an interstellar precursor mission has been designed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasedena in order to study the heliosphere. cont
Advanced Propulsion Technology Group, JPL NASA
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