Interstellar travel edges closer to becoming a reality due to Caltech's Lightsail project.
New Research Advances Laser-Driven Lightsail Technology for Space Exploration
A groundbreaking study by a team from the California Institute of Technology has been published in Nature Photonics, marking an important step towards realizing laser-driven lightsails for space travel. The research, which focuses on the incident angle, power, and spot size of laser forces, provides real-world data on how ultrathin membranes designed for propulsion respond to long-range laser forces under varying illumination conditions.
The team's innovative method avoids unwanted heating effects and provides a new way to measure light's force. This research comes after the Planetary Society's LightSail 2 was awarded by Gizmodo last year for testing the feasibility of photons as a means of satellite propulsion.
The team's research involved a miniature lightsail made of silicon nitride, which was tested in a laboratory setting. They beamed an argon laser at the tethered sail to observe its movements, reporting measurements of side-to-side motions and rotation in the lightsail. The team also measured the radiation pressure on the sail from the laser beam and recorded the sail's movements on a picometer scale (down to trillionths of a meter).
The miniature lightsail propelled a small spacecraft on a 5-million-mile (8-million-kilometer) journey encompassing 18,000 orbits, demonstrating the potential of this technology. Lior Michaeli, a member of the team, believes that lightsail technology has the potential to revolutionize space exploration.
Interstellar missions may still be decades away, but Michaeli aims to demonstrate this new propulsion technology on smaller-scale missions within our solar system in less than a decade. The findings will help develop space-ready lightsails for interstellar travel.
Notably, a recent research group led by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, developed a solution to measure the thin membranes of a lightsail using interferometric techniques. Their preliminary work involved creating durable, lightweight materials and testing small-scale prototypes to ensure stability and control for long-duration space voyages.
In 2016, Breakthrough Initiatives proposed a fleet of lightsail-powered spacecraft that could be accelerated to 20% the speed of light. At such speeds, spacecraft could reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to Earth besides the Sun, in just a couple of decades. This advancement in lightsail technology brings us one step closer to this exciting possibility.
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