NASA's Orion spacecraft for the crewed Artemis 2 mission to fly astronauts around the moon is all fueled up and going through final preparations to ready the vehicle for stacking with its SLS rocket.
Any material used as a light sail is bound by very restrictive physical requirements. It has to be extremely light , can’t melt from the energy applied to it, and must bend, but not break, from that pressure. Various research groups around the world have been working on materials they believe will meet those requirements, and a new paper from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania describes experimental testing of what they believe to be the most functional light sail material yet developed.

