The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will test a space “sailing” technology with a rocket that uses sunlight for propulsion, it said on Tuesday.

The Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, a next-generation solar sail technology, will be launched on Wednesday aboard the Electron rocket from New Zealand‘s Mahia Peninsula by private aerospace company Rocket Lab.

Conventional spacecraft continue to be hampered by their fuel weight, which limits their missions’ duration and distance. For example, Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter weighed 678 kilograms, with fuel weighing a significant 260kg and thus limiting its mission to just one year.

However, solar sail technology aims to overcome this limitation by using sunlight for propulsion. The technology is made possible by a triangular sail about 9 meters long, with an area of about 80 square meters and a thickness of 2.5 micrometers, or about one-fortieth of the thickness of a human hair. The sail is designed to create diffraction effects that allow the spacecraft to efficiently use photons to propel itself.

NASA’s target is for the rocket to ascend to an altitude of about 1,000 kilometers above Earth, and the solar sail will fully deploy after about 25 minutes.

By Ko Jae-won and Chang Iou-chung

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