Celebrating Carl Sagan with a solar sail this week on planetary Radio. Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final

frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society with a special edition of

our show. What better way to mark the 75th anniversary of Carl Sagan's birth

than with the bold announcement of humankind's next attempt to sail the universe.

On the afternoon of Monday, November 9, the Planetary Society came to Capitol Hill to reveal light sale,

a project that will sail a spacecraft on sunlight alone by

the end of 2010.

Here's Executive Director Lou Friedman.

We're back.

We're going to merge the ult-light technology of nanosats with the ultra-large

technology of solar sails with an audacious new program.

The plan calls for not just one solar sail, but three progressively more ambitious missions.

Though much smaller than the Society's earlier Cosmos 1 spacecraft,

LightSail 1 will nevertheless be able to accelerate faster in Earth orbit.

32 square meters of Mylar will dwarf the Cub-Sat-based modules at the center of the diamond-shaped sail.

It'll look much like a giant kite. the by the small but constant pressure of photons streaming from our sun.

There's much more about light sale at planetary.org

and we'll have more to say about this ambitious plan in future episodes of Planetary Radio. Just one of the leaders

who came to Washington for the announcement was the founder and CEO of

Cosmos Studios, Andruian. The writer and producer partnered with Carl Sagan for 20 years, working on projects that included

Cosmos, the most popular series ever to appear on American public television.

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