Japan in first public presentation on sailing in space

8:00 PM Tue 10 Aug 2010 GMT

'Ikaros deploys its solar sail' .

Sailing boats may have been around for thousands of years, and it might have been Brittannia who ruled the waves. However it is the Japanese who have successfully started sailing in space, the sails on their craft pushed by solar wind, and they have just had their first public presentation of the details, with photos shown here. The Ikaros (short for Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun), the world's first space sailing craft, was launched in May this year from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, by engineers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The Second International ...

Click here for full story.

by Kieran Carroll, Space Review/Sail-World