A new solar-sailing spacecraft will be a call to all (future) occupants of interplanetary craft. The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 spacecraft will be a test bed for future missions wanting to use solar sails — including NASA's proposed cubesat, the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout (NEA Scout).
LightSail 2 will launch no earlier than June 13 from the Kennedy Space Center near Orlando, Florida, using SpaceX's new and powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. The spacecraft's ultimate destination will be medium-Earth orbit of about 725 kilometers (450 miles) — roughly double the altitude of the International Space Station.
The mission's ultimate goal is to test out "flight by light," as The Planetary Society calls it — solar sailing in space. This type of propulsion uses the gentle push of charged particles propelled from the sun to move the spacecraft around. The greatest benefit is that the spacecraft doesn't have to carry fuel with it. On a small satellite like a cubesat, said Bruce Betts, chief scientist of The Planetary Society, every gram of weight counts. [The Evolution of Solar Sails in Photos]
This idea is close to being functionally useless. To read more, click here.