Related papers: The Sun Diver: Combining solar sails with the Ober…
The main benefit of an interstellar mission is to carry out in-situ measurements within a target star system. To allow for extended in-situ measurements, the spacecraft needs to be decelerated. One of the currently most promising…
The fission thrust sail as booster for nuclear fusion-based rocket propulsion for future starships is studied. Some required aspects of these systems such as neutron moderation and sail regeneration are discussed. First order calculations…
Observations suggest that the large-scale convective velocities obtained by solar convection simulations might be over-estimated (convective conundrum). One plausible solution to this could be the small-scale dynamo which cannot be fully…
Background: A solar sail presents a large sheet of low areal density membrane and is the most elegant propellant-less propulsion system for the future exploration of the Solar System and beyond. By today the study on sail membrane…
Propellantless propulsion refers to methods of space travel that do not require onboard propellant, instead relying on natural forces or external energy sources. In this paper, I review different approaches that have been explored and…
Kinetic exospheric models revealed that the solar wind is accelerated by an ambipolar electric field up to supersonic velocities. The presence of suprathermal Strahl electrons at the exobase can further increase the velocity to higher…
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 electric solar wind sail (E-sail) is a novel, efficient propellantless propulsion concept which utilises the natural solar wind for spacecraft propulsion with the help of long centrifugally stretched charged tethers. The E-sail requires…
The current preferred envisioned method for transmitting power to a space elevator climber is a laser/photovoltaic (PV) system. In this, a ground-based laser beam would transmit megawatts of optical power through the atmosphere to an…
Theoretical aspects of a solar sail material degradation are presented when the solar electromagnetic and corpuscular forms of radiation were considered as sources of degradation. The analysis of the interaction of two components of solar…
A solar sail is one of the most promising space exploration system because of its theoretically infinite specific impulse using solar radiation pressure (SRP). Recently, some researchers proposed "transformable spacecrafts" that can…
Achieving relativistic flight to enable extrasolar exploration is one of the dreams of humanity and the long term goal of our NASA Starlight program. We derive a fully relativistic solution for the motion of a spacecraft propelled by…
The transverse radiation pressure force and acceleration is compared for two parametrically optimized designs: prismatic and two-pillar metasurface gratings. The numerical results were cross-verified with both Maxwell stress tensor and…
Several lines of evidence suggest that the velocity amplitude in global simulations of solar convection, U, may be systematically over-estimated. Motivated by these recent results, we explore the factors that determine U and we consider how…
The radiation pressure exerted by incoherent light on diverse surfaces is examined. The thermodynamic rule, first given by Carnot in 1824, describes the limitation to the amount of free energy that can be obtained from a source of thermal…
In the solar convection zone, rotation couples with intensely turbulent convection to drive a strong differential rotation and achieve complex magnetic dynamo action. Our sun must have rotated more rapidly in its past, as is suggested by…
The use of ultrathin solid foils offers optimal conditions for accelerating protons from laser-matter interactions. When the target is thin enough that relativistic self-induced transparency (RSIT) sets in, all of the target electrons get…
The Solar System Odyssey mission uses modern-day high-precision experimental techniques to test the laws of fundamental physics which determine dynamics in the solar system. It could lead to major discoveries by using demonstrated…
Asteroids, planets, stars in some open clusters, as well as molecular clouds appear to possess a preferential spin-orbit alignment, pointing to shared processes that tie their rotation at birth to larger parent structures. We present a new…
In the corona, plasma is accelerated to hundreds of kilometers per second, and heated to temperatures hundreds of times hotter than the Sun's surface, before it escapes to form the solar wind. Decades of space-based experiments have shown…