Solar sails, which harness sunlight as sailboats harness the wind, could be affordable probes in the search for alien life on at least two icy moons in our solar system — Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus, a new study suggests.
Unlike conventional rockets, which require lots of fuel to generate thrust, solar sails leverage the subtle push of sunlight to cruise through space. They are propelled when photons, or particles of light, strike them and impart their momentum. This way, "the light itself functions like the wind," Manasvi Lingam, an astrobiologist at the Florida Institute of Technology and the lead author of the new paper, told Space.com.
