NASA taps into the magic of diffraction to build solar sailing spacecraft

Sails have propelled earthlings across the seas for millennia, but NASA believes their future is off-world. The space agency has unveiled plans to develop a new solar sail system for a demonstration mission. Dubbed Diffractive Solar Sailing, the project won Phase III of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which supports visionary space technologies. Those picked for Phase III are the closest to becoming real — so a spacecraft powered by solar sails isn’t a quixotic prospect. Indeed, variations of the technique have already reaped results. In 2010, a Japanese probe called Ikaros became the first craft to successfully use the tech…

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