There has been huge progress on laser pushed sails. Laser pushed sails appear to be a path to sending probes up to 20% of the speed of light when we can make 1 gram sails that are one to two meters on a side.
There is still work needed to make the sail area about one thousand times larger for interstellar missions.
Researchers are now progressing to hold down tests. They are making usable sails which will be useful for breakthrough missions inside the solar system. Probes could reach Mars in about 32 hours and Saturn in 3 weeks.
They can now test the probes in the lab with hold down tests to experiment with stability when they will be launched.
They are working on near term designs for the interplanetary missions.
They are using AI machine learning to optimize for reduced costs and have removed $1 milion of cost for each planned mission.
When the Breakthrough Starshot announced eight years ago in 2016, they had tiny amounts of the superthin sail material (350 nanometers by 350 nanometers). They can now make it 16,000 times larger (60 millimeters by 60 millimeters).
The materials used are dielectric and currently are silicon nitride.
Holes are made in the laser pushed sails which make them into mirrors at the desired wavelengths. The mirror effect needs to work across a range of wavelengths because of the doppler effect as the sails will speed up.
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Something that wasn’t covered in the video: I don’t understand how a rotating, orbiting Earth can focus a laser beam on a light sail long enough to achieve relativistic speeds. Don’t you need something in a stable position in space – perhaps powered by nuclear fission/fusion or at least solar power – to emit constant laser beams to the light sail vehicle?
Scott, the laser-sail is boosted in about 20 minutes or so. So super-quick.
But why restrict it to only 20 minutes, especially given its low thrust characteristics? Is it because the lasers can’t shoot into space longer than that with any kind of precision or force? If not, it might be possible to either achieve a greater percentage of C with a longer laser interaction, or to increase the weight of the vehicles – the biggest obstacle in enabling this. Maybe they need multiple laser stations, or, more likely a single space-based laser “cannon” that can stay focused on the light sail while Earth rotates below. Also, you remove any atmospheric dilution that way. True, energy requirements might nix this idea.
How is this suposed to survive interstellar dust at relativistic speed? It’d be like sending jello into a sandblaster plume.
The density of interstellar dust is very low.