Artur Davoyan, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received an Early Career Faculty award from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The award includes a three-year, $600,000 grant to support Davoyan’s ongoing research into solar sail technologies for spacecraft propulsion and maneuvering.
Solar sails work like sailboats but are powered by sunlight instead of wind. The technology could enable space exploration at extraordinary speeds, cutting the transit time to the outer planets from several years down to a few months. But current solar sails are limited in their maneuverability. Davoyan, who heads the Advanced Space Systems Laboratory at UCLA, has been working on developing metamaterials — advanced materials with unique capabilities that could be integrated into the sail.
He also leads NASA’s extreme solar sailing mission study, with a goal of enabling fast-transit interstellar probe missions. Davoyan is also involved in Breakthrough Starshot — part of the Breakthrough Initiatives, which aim to send a light-propelled probe to the Alpha Centauri star system 4.37 light-years away.
