Related papers: Wind--Pellet Shear Sailing
A technique by which a spacecraft can interact with flows of ionized gas in space (the solar wind or interstellar medium) to be accelerated to velocities greater than the wind velocity is explored. Inspired by the dynamic soaring maneuvers…
The Magnetic Sail is a space propulsion system that utilizes the interaction between solar wind particles and an artificial dipole magnetic field generated by a spacecraft's coil to produce thrust without the need for additional plasma or…
In this paper, we explore from a conceptual standpoint the possibility of using natural astrophysical sources to accelerate spacecrafts to relativistic speeds. We focus on light sails and electric sails, which are reliant on momentum…
NASA has been considering a solar sail that would accelerate a craft to a high velocity (~ 14 AU/yr) by the time it reached 5 AU. Then the sail would be dropped and the craft would coast alone to deep space. We propose that the sail be…
Microwave propelled sails are a new class of spacecraft using photon acceleration. It is the only method of interstellar flight that has no physics issues. Laboratory demonstrations of basic features of beam-driven propulsion, flight,…
All known interstellar transportation methods encounter monumental technological or engineering roadblocks, or even rely on speculative unknown science. In particular light of the recent public excitement and ensuing disappointment…
Electric sails are propulsion systems that generate momentum via the deflection of stellar wind particles through electric forces. Here, we investigate the relative merits of electric sails and light sails driven by stellar radiation…
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 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 primary challenge of rocket propulsion is the burden of needing to accelerate the spacecraft's own fuel, resulting in only a logarithmic gain in maximum speed as propellant is added to the spacecraft. Light sails offer an attractive…
The authors describe the general motion of radiation-pushed sails accelerated near the speed of light with directed energy propulsion. Practical applications of the model are also given, including the interstellar flyby mission to the Alpha…
Consuming long-range interplanetary medium with fuel for driving plasma thrust is vital. Methods of capturing the space environment depending on its density and the ship velocity are indispensable issues to extract the space environment as…
X-ray observations of kilo-parsec scale jets indicate that a synchrotron origin of the sustained non-thermal emission is likely. This requires distributed acceleration of electrons up to near PeV energies along the jet. The underlying…
Water has been identified as a critical resource both to sustain human-life but also for use in propulsion, attitude-control, power, thermal and radiation pro-tection systems. Water may be obtained off-world through In-Situ Resource…
Author offers a revolutionary method non-rocket transfer of energy and thrust into Space with distance of millions kilometers. The author has developed theory and made the computations. The method is more efficient than transmission of…
Intermittent pulsars are part-time radio pulsars. They have higher slow down rate in the on state (radio-loud) than in the off state (radio-quiet). This gives the evidence that particle wind may play an important role in pulsar spindown.…
In the solar atmosphere, jets are prevalent and they are significant for the mass and energy transport. Here we conduct numerical simulations to investigate the mass and energy contributions of the recently observed high-speed jets to the…
Numerous spherical ``shells" have been observed in young star-forming environments that host low- and intermediate-mass stars. These observations suggest that these shells may be produced by isotropic stellar wind feedback from young…
Interstellar transport is an object of interest in many sci-fi stories. In history a lot of sci-fi predictions have turned into reality, such as communications satellites, deep-sea submarines and journies to the moon. In this work we study…
We study experimentally a a three-dimensional reduced model of a sail shape performing pitching oscillations around a mean incidence angle ($\alpha_{m}$) with respect to an incoming flow in a hydrodynamic channel at a constant velocity…