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#51 2025-04-02 12:54:19
- Void
- Member
- Registered: 2011-12-29
- Posts: 8,256
Re: Solar Sails
Well, I ran into this encouraging thing today: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo … 15ed&ei=23
Quote:
These Space Sails, Built in 24 Hours, Could Enable Fast Interplanetary Missions!
Story by Arezki Amiri • 7h •
3 min read
Quote:
The team developed sails that measure 60 by 60 millimeters and are only 200 nanometers thick—about 400 times thinner than a sheet of paper. These sails are engineered from pentagonally structured photonic crystals, which act like neural networks for light, optimizing the way photons interact with the sail’s surface.
The sails are riddled with billions of holes at the nanoscale, reducing mass while maintaining reflectivity and control. According to the researchers, these photonic structures give the sails their key performance characteristics, particularly the ability to convert laser light into usable propulsion with high efficiency.
If this achieves the desire, I am anticipating that these will accelerate faster, which should get rid of a lot of dead time. To the degree that the sails can tolerate the heat, I suppose you can increase the total intensity of the lasers.
Quote:
One of the most significant aspects of the project is the sheer speed with which these sails can now be produced. Older designs, like those proposed for Breakthrough Starshot, faced enormous logistical hurdles.
Fabricating a sail with billions of nanoscale perforations took more than a decade using traditional methods. By contrast, the Delft and Brown collaboration has compressed this timeline to just 24 hours. This leap in manufacturing speed doesn’t just bring the concept closer to reality—it also allows for rapid iteration and testing of new designs.
Quote:
Should this technology scale as anticipated, its implications could be dramatic.A journey to Mars, which typically takes six to nine months, could be shortened to just a few days for lightweight probes.
These sails, propelled by Earth-based or orbital lasers, would open the door not only to rapid exploration of our solar system but also to experimental physics on the nature of light-matter interaction and relativistic phenomena at macroscopic scales.
I guess time will tell if this technology could be scaled to a size that allowed transport of heavy cargo and crew.
Endind Pending 
Last edited by Void (2025-04-02 13:02:58)
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