Related papers: Starship Sails Propelled by Cost-Optimized Directe…
Formation-flying studies to date have required continuous and minute corrections of the orbital elements and attitudes of the spacecraft.This increases the complexity, and associated risk, of controlling the formation, which often makes…
There is a desire to observe the sun's poles to further deepen our understanding of solar activity. However, because of the large speeds needed to perform out-of-ecliptic plane maneuvers, chemical and electric rocket propulsion mechanisms…
The electric solar wind sail is a novel propellantless space propulsion concept. According to numerical estimates, the electric solar wind sail can produce a large total impulse per propulsion system mass. Here we consider using a 0.5 N…
The significance of laser-driven polarized beam acceleration has been increasingly recognized in recent years. We propose an efficient method for generating polarized proton beams from a pre-polarized hydrogen halide gas jet, utilizing…
A charged tether or wire experiences Coulomb drag when inserted into flowing plasma. In the solar wind the Coulomb drag can be utilised as efficient propellantless interplanetary propulsion as the electric solar wind sail (electric sail,…
Solar sails enable missions to observe the solar environment from unique vantage points, such as sustained observations away from the Sun-Earth line; sub-L1 station keeping; high inclination solar orbits; Earth polar-sitting and…
This paper considers galactic scale Beacons from the point of view of expense to a builder on Earth. For fixed power density in the far field, what is the cost-optimum interstellar Beacon system? Experience shows an optimum tradeoff,…
The application of directed energy to spacecraft mission design is explored using rapid transit to Mars as the design objective. An Earth-based laser array of unprecedented size (10~m diameter) and power (100~MW) is assumed to be enabled by…
Laser-driven acceleration holds great promise for significantly improving accelerating gradient. However, scaling the conventional process of structure-based acceleration in vacuum down to optical wavelengths requires a substantially…
Compact laser-plasma acceleration of fast ions has made great strides since its discovery over two decades ago, resulting in the current generation of high-energy ($\geq 100\,\rm MeV$) ultracold beams over ultrashort ($\leq 1\,\rm ps$)…
Solar sails can play a critical role in enabling solar and heliophysics missions. Solar sail technology within NASA is currently at 80% of TRL-6, suitable for an in-flight technology demonstration. It is conceivable that an initial…
This work investigates the feasibility and design trade-offs for a companion spacecraft, or PaddleSat, to charge a host spacecraft by wirelessly transmitting power using a directional laser system. The primary goal of the PaddleSat is to…
A simulated annealing based algorithm is presented for the determination of optimal ship routes through the minimization of a cost function. This cost function is a weighted sum of the time of voyage and the voyage comfort (safety is taken…
At a distance of about 4.22 lightyears, it would take about 100,000 years for humans to visit our closest stellar neighbor Proxima Centauri using modern chemical thrusters. New technologies are now being developed that involve high-power…
Ultrathin lightsails propelled by laser radiation pressure to relativistic speeds are currently the most promising route for flyby-based exoplanet exploration. However, there has been a notable lack of experimental characterization of key…
We review basic physics of line-driven stellar winds of OB stars. We discuss elementary processes due to which stellar winds are accelerated on a microscopic level. We show how these microscopic processes may enable the outflow and how they…
New development approaches, including launch vehicles and advances in sensors, computing, and software, have lowered the cost of entry into space, and have enabled a revolution in low-cost, high-risk Small Satellite (SmallSat) missions. To…
The simultaneous laser-driven acceleration and angular manipulation of the fast electron beam is experimentally demonstrated. The bunch of multi-MeV energy charged particles is generated during the propagation of the femtosecond laser pulse…
A scheme for fast, compact, and controllable acceleration of heavy particles in vacuum is proposed, in which two counterpropagating lasers with variable frequencies drive a beat-wave structure with variable phase velocity, thus allowing for…
Highly ambitious initiatives aspire to propel a miniature spacecraft to a neighboring star within a human generation, leveraging the radiation pressure of lasers for propulsion. One of the main challenges to achieving this enormous feat is…