This 36-square-centimetre wafer could work as a light sail
L. Norder et al. (2024)
A light sail designed using artificial intelligence is about 1000 times thinner than a human hair and weighs as much as a grain of sand – and it could help us create a spacecraft capable of reaching another star sooner than we thought.
The Breakthrough Starshot mission to travel to Alpha Centauri – the closest star to our solar system – was announced in 2016 and invited researchers to design a spaceship powered by light.
The…
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