Breakthrough Starship wants to use a 100 Gigawatt laser array to push an ultralight 4 meter X 4 meter nanocrystal solar sail. StarChip is the name used by Breakthrough Initiatives for a very small, centimeter-sized, gram-scale, interstellar spacecraft envisioned for the Breakthrough Starshot program. The light sail is envisioned to be no larger than 4 …
Physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) have made an optical mirror using only a few hundred identical atoms. They used a new metamaterial made of a single structured layer. few hundred identical atoms. Interfering laser beams hold two layers of atoms in arrays. This has come from an emerging new field …
Extreme metamaterial solar sails as proposed here have the potential to shift the paradigm of space exploration enabling numerous low cost and high-speed missions to be launched anytime and anywhere. Such sails could gain accelerations over 60AU/yr when coupled to low mass spacecraft and dive to extreme proximity to the sun (just 2-5 solar radii). …
Power is everything is a famous quote from the movie Apollo 13. A similar statement is made by Marc Millis about interstellar travel. Marc is a thought leader in interstellar travel. Marc says that for whatever speed increase we want then we will need to square the energy increase. If we want to go ten …
Femtosecond Projection Two-photon Lithography (FP-TPL) printing technology increases the printing speed by 1,000 – 10,000 times, and reduces the cost by 98%. It controls the laser spectrum via temporal focusing, the laser 3D printing process is performed in a parallel layer-by-layer fashion instead of point-by-point writing. This is a technological breakthrough that leads nanoscale 3D …
This is an update of the system under development by John Brophy and his team and it will use a kilometer-scale, multi-hundred-megawatt phased-array laser to beam power to a vehicle that converts it to electrical power for a multi-megawatt electric propulsion system that produces a specific impulse of 58,000 s. This will enable velocities of …
There is a NASA NIAC study to improved laser pushed sails with advanced diffracted solar sail. Advanced diffractive films may afford advantages over passive reflective surfaces for a variety space missions that use solar or laser in-space propulsion. Three cases are compared: Sun-facing diffractive sails, Littrow diffraction configurations, and conventional reflective sails. A simple Earth-to-Mars …
Nature materials -Materials challenges for the Starshot lightsail A solar sail able to be pushed by lasers to 20% of light speed would need to be about 10 square meters but weigh less than a gram. The sail will have to average out to being 100 atoms thick yet still be able to transmit the …
Nature materials -Materials challenges for the Starshot lightsail A solar sail able to be pushed by lasers to 20% of light speed would need to be about 10 square meters but weigh less than a gram. The sail will have to average out to being 100 atoms thick yet still be able to transmit the …
Les Johnson of the NASA Marshall Space Center provides a 37-page presentation on solar sails covering the technical details, past projects and future projects. Near-term work is with various cubesats and solar sails. Near Earth Asteroid Scout The Near Earth Asteroid Scout Will • Image/characterize a NEA during a slow flyby • Demonstrate a low-cost …
