NYTimes.com: About a year from now, if all goes well, a box called LightSail-1, about the size of a loaf of bread, will pop out of a rocket some 500 miles above the Earth.
There in the vacuum it will unfurl four triangular sails (see left image for an artist’s rendition of LightSail-1 by Rick Sternbach. Credit: Planetary Society) as shiny as moonlight and only barely more substantial. Then it will slowly rise on a sunbeam and move across the stars. LightSail-1 will sail only a few hours and gain a few miles in altitude.But those hours will mark a milestone in the quest to navigate the cosmos on winds of starlight the way sailors for thousands of years have navigated the ocean on the winds of the Earth.
The finding that the Saturnian moon may host layers of icy slush instead of a global ocean could change how planetary scientists think about other icy moons as well.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.
January 29, 2026 12:52 PM
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