NASA and industry partners used two 100-foot lightweight composite booms to stretch out a 4,300-square-foot (400-square-meter) prototype solar sail quadrant for the first time in Building 4316 at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, on Oct. 13. Solar sails use the force of light – not rocket fuel – to fly in deep space. They get a gentle, constant push from sunlight particles, or photons, hitting their giant reflective surfaces. The fully deployed sail the covers an area larger than the surface of a tennis court with an aluminum-coated plastic material that’s thinner than a human hair. The full-scale prototype is only a quarter of the sail designed to fly the Solar Cruiser spacecraft towards the Sun and demonstrate orbits that would be difficult or impossible for conventional satellites to maintain.

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