{"id":125131,"date":"2021-07-19T10:22:18","date_gmt":"2021-07-19T17:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/tiny-satellite-will-use-solar-sail-to-investigate-asteroid"},"modified":"2021-07-19T10:22:18","modified_gmt":"2021-07-19T17:22:18","slug":"tiny-satellite-will-use-solar-sail-to-investigate-asteroid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/tiny-satellite-will-use-solar-sail-to-investigate-asteroid","title":{"rendered":"Tiny Satellite Will Use Solar Sail to Investigate Asteroid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/tiny-satellite-will-use-solar-sail-to-investigate-asteroid.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Following the success in 2019 of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.digitaltrends.com\/cool-tech\/lightsail-2-future-space-travel\/\">Bill Nye and the Planetary Society\u2019s solar sail craft<\/a> LightSail 2, NASA plans to launch its own solar sail project to investigate near-Earth asteroids.<\/p>\n<p>The Near-Earth Asteroid Scout (NEA Scout) is a small satellite around the size of a shoebox that will sail through space powered by sunlight. The hardware will consist of a stainless steel boom structure across which a thin, aluminum-coated plastic sail will be stretched. The total area covered by the sail is around that of a racquetball court, and as photons from the sun bounce off the shiny surface, they will propel the craft forward.<\/p>\n<p>As wacky as this idea sounds \u2014 it was made famous by, among others, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke \u2014 it has been shown to work in low-Earth orbit by the LightSail project. Now NASA will take this one step further by deploying a solar sail in deep space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Following the success in 2019 of Bill Nye and the Planetary Society\u2019s solar sail craft LightSail 2, NASA plans to launch its own solar sail project to investigate near-Earth asteroids. The Near-Earth Asteroid Scout (NEA Scout) is a small satellite around the size of a shoebox that will sail through space powered by sunlight. The [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}