NASA's latest spacecraft, which is powered by sunlight, is getting closer to flight. It is scheduled to launch at 3:30 am IST on Rocket Lab's Electron rocket from New Zealand with the name Advanced Composite Solar Sail System. NASA says that when the spacecraft is fully extended, which will happen 25 minutes after liftoff, it will be positioned 1,000 kilometers above Earth and have a surface area of roughly 80 square meters.

The mission's first phase will run for a few months, after which the solar sail will unfold. The huge sails of this spaceship will emerge from an oven-sized CubeSat located at its core. In reality, the solar sail is a very thin layer that assists a spaceship in propulsion during solar particle bombardment.

The NASA team will demonstrate orbit raising and lowering of the CubeSat by using sunlight falling onto its sails through a series of pointing movements over the course of the next few weeks. The spaceship will be seen like Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, if its alignment is ideal.

According to NASA, developing solar sail technology will lessen the need for powerful propulsion systems and may even allow for more affordable and extended missions. As the Sun will continue to burn for billions of years, our supply of propulsion is virtually endless. "We can launch larger sails that use "fuel" already available for future missions, rather than launching massive fuel tanks," stated Alan Rhodes, chief systems engineer for the mission at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Larger-scale expeditions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond may become possible as a result of the future mission, according to the agency. However, the sail booms' size, which functions similarly to a sailboat's mast, determines all of this.

NASA plans to test the boom designs for any larger sail flights in the future during this mission. The one being utilized for the next operation, according to Rhodes, is seven meters long, but it can "roll up into a shape that fits in your hand."

Following testing, the designs might be expanded to accommodate solar sails up to 21,500 square feet (2,000 square meters), or roughly half of a soccer field, in the future. Initially, the designs would support solar sails as large as 5,400 square feet (500 square meters), or around the size of a basketball court.