Hundreds of Nomadic Worlds Within 4 Light Years

New research indicates that tens to hundreds of planet-sized nomadic worlds may populate the spherical volume centered on Earth and circumscribed by Proxima Centauri, and thus may comprise closer interstellar targets than any stellar planetary system. For the first time, there is systematic analysis of the feasibility of exploring these unbounded celestial bodies via deep …

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Progress to Ultralight 16 Square Meter Nanocrystal Solar Sails for Breakthrough Starshot

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 …

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Ceramic Metamaterial Solar Sails Could Enable 300 Kilometers per Second

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). …

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Latest Progress Towards Laser Pushed Solar Sails

Philip Lubin has led a team at UCSB to create laser arrays for propulsion and asteroid deflection. He has received NASA and Starshot funding. There have 100 students in his programs. They have created hardware components and performed various experiments. The DE-STAR (Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and ExploRation) has several sizes. DE-STAR-1 …

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A SpaceCraft Could Get to 430,000 Miles From the Sun Using Proposed Coating

In 2018 the Parker Solar Probe launched and plans to approach the Sun to within 8.5 solar radii (4 million miles) of its surface. This is seven times closer than any previous mission. Researchers think a new coating could allow spacecraft to get close as one solar radii (430,000 miles) from the Sun’s surface. This …

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