A potential new way to travel through space launched aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from Launch Complex 1 located on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula.
The mission, named “Beginning of the Swarm,” put two payloads into a Sun-synchronous orbit. The flight lifted off at 22:32 UTC on April 23, 2024.
One of the two payloads aboard the mission is NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3). The goal is to test a new composite that can be folded up inside something as small as a CubeSat and still deploy and remain rigid once in space.