This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption:
Artist's rendering of a four-quadrant solar sail propulsion system, with payload. NASA is designing and developing such concepts, a sub-scale model of which may be tested on a future NMP mission.


Editors note: this image may be downloading from http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/news_images/solar_sail_art.jpg .