<https://thedebrief.org/light-sail-could-reach-proxima-centauri-in-20-years/>

Light Sail Could Reach Proxima Centauri in 20 Years

Christopher Plain
Feb 21, 2022
The Debrief

Researchers have proposed a light sail design that should be able to
survive the stresses of an interstellar voyage. As part of NASA's
Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, the engineers behind the new light
sail design say that their proposed structure could withstand the
immense laser light pressures (and heat) needed to accelerate them to
20% the speed of light.

INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL AND WARP DRIVES

Space is big. Even flying to the moon takes days, and hopping a rocket
ship to Mars takes months. Rockets are wholly impractical for trips to
other star systems, with proposed travel times extending into the tens
of 1000s of years. Theoretical propulsion concepts like WARP
drives might be able to make the trip to another star in the distant
future. But at present, the technological capabilities needed to
design and build such science-fiction-inspired spacecraft are unavailable.

Now, a group of researchers working on a directed energy propulsion
concept that employs a light sail say they have figured out how to
manage the heat and stress that lasers powering their craft will
experience.

LASER POWERED LIGHT SAIL COULD REACH PROXIMA CENTAURI IN 20 YEARS

To address the heat and pressure issues a laser-powered light sail is
expected to experience, a team led by Igor Bargatin, an Associate
Professor in the Dept of Mechanical Engineering and Applied
Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania, zeroed in on the
materials and design specifications that they believe can do the job.

"Reaching another star within our lifetimes is going to require
relativistic speed or something approaching the speed of light," said
Bargatin in a press release announcing the proposed sail design. "The
idea of a light sail has been around for some time, but we're just now
figuring out how to make sure those designs survive the trip."

The team's primary concern is the extreme heat and pressure from the
lasers that will power the light sail across the void of space. In a
solar sail, where the sun's light provides propulsion, much like the
wind in a conventional sailboat, pressure is a minimal concern.
However, if future Breakthrough Starshot mission planners are correct,
an array of powerful lasers will be needed to propel their
microchip-sized probe up to 20% light speed. Furthermore, according to
the press release, those lasers will have to focus their collective
energy on "a three-meter-wide structure a 1000 times thinner than
a sheet of paper."

In the first of 2 papers on the subject, the research team
determined that their target light sail should not be flat as a drum
but instead should be allowed to billow out like a spinnaker on a
sailing ship. This shape should enable it to share the tension load
of the light pressure more evenly, reducing the risk of ripping or tearing.

"The intuition here is that a very tight sail, whether it's on a
sailboat or in space, is much more prone to tears," explained
Bargatin. "It's a relatively easy concept to grasp, but we needed to
do some very complex math actually to show how these materials would
behave at this scale."

....

--
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