Space startup Xplore Solar Sail spacecraft design would go seven times faster than the Voyager spacecraft to enable vastly improved exploration of the solar system. The initial design would be to get to 5AU/year speeds but we need to improve it to 40 AU/year speeds. The goal would be to reach 550-650 AU where the gravitational lens areas. The solar gravitational lens (SGL) uses light focused by the Sun’s gravity and improve telescope capabilities by 100 billion times.
The new SunVane concept uses multiple sails, making it easier to package and more controllable in flight. Centauri Dreams desscribes the ‘Lightcraft’ design out of Xplore Inc. as next step in solar sail evolution. The design could open up the outer system to microsat missions of all kinds.
Using the SGL is by far the best and most practical way we can ever get a high-resolution, multi-pixel image of an Earth-like exoplanet and determine if they are potentially habitable. Details of a novel mission design starting with a rideshare launch from the Earth, spiraling in toward the Sun, and then flying around it to achieve solar system exit speeds of over 20 AU/year. A new sailcraft design is used to make possible high area to mass ratio for the sailcraft. The mission design enables other fast solar system missions, starting with a proposed very low cost technology demonstration mission (TDM) to prove the functionality and operation of the microsat-solar sail design and then, building on the TDM, missions to explore distant regions of the solar system, and those to study Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) and the recently discovered interstellar objects (ISOs) are also possible.
The steps:
– A Lightcraft Demonstration Mission to exercise and prove the technology of an interplanetary microsat sailcraft to exit the solar system faster than any previous vehicle, with goal of 5–6 AU/year. The mission would carry only popular interest payloads and partner with NASA. Total mass of sailcraft ≈ 6 kg
– A solar system mission, possibly to rendezvous with a newly discovered interstellar object to another small body in or beyond the asteroid belt. Velocity goal of > 7 AU/year, with science payload < 10 kg. – Exoplanet Observers – mission capability to reach the focal line of the solar gravity lens in < 25 years. Exoplanet imaging with the SGL using 1–2 meter coronagraph/telescope, optical communications, small radioisotope power, electric micro-thrusters A 2021 copy of the full report is here.
A sail of 100 X 100 square meters is about as large as we are able to work with in the near term.
Pushing out interstellar boundaries also means pushing materials science hard. The sail needs to be as thin as one micron, with a density less than 1 gram per square meter. The kind of sail would be 10 kg that would move a 40 kg spacecraft. The payload would need to take solar flux at 0.1 AU is 100 times what we receive on Earth. The close pass to the Sun is needed to swing near and then out to get more speed.
In 2022, Xplore received $16.2 million in funding to date and has over $4 million in NASA and other grants. Space sector investors include: Alumni Ventures, Brightstone Venture Capital, KittyHawk Ventures, Private Shares Fund, Starbridge Venture Capital, Helios Capital, Lombard Street and Gaingels. Notable investors also include Tremendous View, Kingfisher Capital and Dylan Taylor – commercial astronaut and CEO of Voyager Space.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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The SGL mission seems to be based on a flawed technological premise. You want a (gravitational) lens to create a focal point. Great. But. A planet will do and you don’t actually need a single focal point. A long rod or an electrically charged plasma when looking along its axel will also bend light. And you can play around with density.
Moreover, you don’t even need a gravitational body. There must be a way to ‘fake’ a gravitational lens by creating a composite (ring)-lens, a large diameter narrow torus with the middle part empty, and much better at bending than gravitational light bending, with a focal point much nearer than the sun. Meters, kilometers away, not astronomical units.
The problem with these suggested SGL probes are that they are radially flyby. They have to be aimed precisely and then get a glimpse of one object for a few years. To cover everything, we will have to build something resembling a friggin Dyson sphere of probes with a 1200 AU diameter. I haven’t done the math but we may run out of matter in the solar system.
Clearly, we will need loitering observatories that can re-locate. These will have to be much larger. We will still need a million of them to survey the galaxy.
Right you are.
The real problem is that there aren’t any ‘space brakes’ out there to grab onto to STOP when you get to a juicy observer’s location. Well … there are — if you want not to send a few kilograms of butterfly wings and fizzy AI imaging bits out there, but rather enough reaction mass (also known as ‘fuel-and-oxidizer’) to retro-jet long enough to do the stopping. And maybe jet about a bit to center onto the sweet spot.
And that’s not a duffel of butterfly wings.
Its thousands of kilograms.
But … but … but then there’s the problem of actually getting out to 600 Astronomical Units, or 600 times the distance from Sol to Terra … in a encouragingly short span … you know, like way less than a career lifetime.
As a species, we’re really not strong believers in making and launching machines — today — that take 100 to 300 years to get someplace and are still expected to power up and work when they get there. And not be completely obsoleted by 200 years of intervening technology, making the original investment, ahem… how to say it, a poor one?
So yes, you got it.
Perhaps the only answer that has a hope of producing the ΔV to zip out of here toward yonder, then flip over and ‘stop’ by the same ΔV more or less, is nuclear power and lots of cheap liquified argon as the reaction mass.
Argon is non-corrosive, and deep space is fine for keeping it liquid perpetually.
Nuclear reactors are good at producing downright amazing amounts of power.
So… there we are. Efficient ION rockets. 25 AU a year, 40 year transit times, and plenty of interesting astronomical observation opportunities along the way. Never a dull moment.
Until you hit a pebble. Well, don’t hit pebbles. Lesson of the story.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
The possibility of building telescopes in the outer reaches of the Solar system and using lensing as well as current success at the very primitive beginnings of knowing about exoplanets does change the chance of a dark Forrest answer to the Fermi Paradox. A tech civ doesn’t have to send probes everywhere to know what’s going on. We couldn’t hide. Our solar system didn’t escape notice by being quiet and obscure. Earth would have been interesting and could easily have been known long before humans.
GoatGuy mentions “until the batteries run out”.
Assuming the people running this project aren’t idiots, the battery will be something like the kilopower reactor, which could likely provide power for timescales of a century or more.
Its not the people designing the projects which are idiots, Jim.
Its the regulators that won’t let smart people’s potentially dangerous inventions be launched to space to begin with. That’s the problem. But none-the-less, even nuclear reactors are just “big batteries” of sorts. And they too run out eventually.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
The next best thing after actually going there.
And also this relative ease of building gravity solar telescopes, is why I find arguments of an ultra-aggressive “Dark Forest” silly.
We would be so detected, and this for billions of years, had there been anyone there looking for us in a pretty big radius.
But let’s notice that an empty galaxy is also technically compatible with the Dark Forest, simply we might be too far away or too early for anyone to know and care about us.
If we’re not alone and we have been indeed seen, the fact we ‘are’ is somewhat mysterious. The reason is that spacefaring civilizations are assumed to grow in space and energy, and this approaching exponential growth, regardless of intent. Tree huggers and lotus eaters that never go to space are irrelevant for the future of the cosmos.
If aliens exist, can leave their planet and know about us, and yet we are here, where is the space and energy needed for those old civilizations growth?
It’s interesting to think on how easy this is (relatively speaking). Because for civilization substantially older than ours they could have looked at an awful lot. And for 3 billion years or more, anyone looking at our planet and it’s atmosphere would have found it rather interesting.
That no one has done anything with that information in all that time is another thing that argues to me that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that, at least in this galaxy, there is no one else out there. We are either early, or rare, or both (actually it would have to be both). Of course, falling back on the anthropic principle, if there was anyone that was earlier, we would probably not be here. Even Kirk’s Federation, with its Prime Directive, seemed to have no qualms about colonizing anything that didn’t already have a sentient race in residence when they found it.
I don’t know, Snazz’ster. Let’s also throw in there “space is almost unimaginably huge”. That, and maybe the “ping time” at [c = 299,792,458 m/s], with these almost ridiculous distances, is in “hundreds to thousands of lifetimes”.
Attention span.
Big problem — even with technological immortality.
But again, supposing that astronomical gravitational lensing is The Next-to-Last Big Thing for sussing out the details of exoplanetary systems at least to what, the fuzzy image and better yet, spectrographic level? I would venture that those are minima. Imaging allows for funding inducing “Ah, look! Grankle in the Arcos system has oceans! More mun, please!”. Grankle-watchers get a AGL spectrograph, and far more serious scientific inquiry engages.
And so, we look at Grankle “until the batteries run out” (seriously — the solar power at AGL point of 600 AU is like hárvéstıng moonlight) and with (who knows, but I will guess) 99% probability, Grankle turns out to be a sadly commonplace rock, like all the rest Humankind has spent its mun and time investigating. We lose track of Grankle, and stuff all the gigabytes in a folder, hopefully not completely forgotten.
Because who knows! In a hundred million or billion years, Grankle’s muddy inhabitants might rise up and start arguing politics and making stellar gravitational telescopes and, and, and … be worth “saying hi! to”.
Wait. Really?
See, for me this is an interest-horizon problem. The enormity of JUST our “local neighborhood” (3260 light years or 1 kiloparsec radius), and the G*dd*mn Time it takes for life, evolution, progress, rising out of the mud, arguing politics, telegraphing energies which might be detected, yadayada. Interest-horizon problem.
Again, we can find rationale in rejiggering this to Earth-and-humans scale. If we didn’t have planes, radios and big honking boats, we’d have to walk or paddle everywhere. 10 to 25 miles a day. Like our American Conestoga wagon forebearers, walking across the prairie, the mountains, the deserts took from early Spring to the impending late Autumn. That’s about half a year. The “ping time” was horrible. But it was enough to expand across the Americas and India and so on, in a dozen or two human generations. Then we got trains. Then telegraphs. Then radios. Then the Internet! Wheee!
But that rejiggering back to the Conestoga Wagon era, stretched out to lightspeed (and very much limited by it) shows again that the limits are the “interest horizon” of the civilizations endeavoring to carry the flame forward. The “local kiloparsec” alone (Milky Way is 27 kpc across, so 1/700th of it) is pretty daunting from an interest-horizon point of view.
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That’s my answer to the Fermi Paradox. The enormity of space is profound. The TIME of space-distances … daunting. Even if we were positively teaming with exocivilizations (that weren’t fond of going on big exoplanetary safaris, to sample the local flora and fauna — like us), the mean distance between us is still ridiculously large. Thousands of lightyears. AVERAGE.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
It’s not an answer to the Fermi paradox if tech civs expand across interstellar distances at all. Unless that is effectively impossible, any tech civ like us would expand to fill the entire galaxy in a relatively short period of time, a few million years. The earth is a big place too from the pov of microorganisms but they replicate and adapt and fill every possible niche they can reach pretty quickly. Either we are among the very first, or something prevents them from expanding, or they physically can’t expand. Space is big isn’t enough.