SPACE — Space flight technology has continued to develop in the last decade. Primarily, the propulsion system and speed of spacecraft are the key to fulfilling humanity’s thirst to explore the vast universe.
The future of space exploration now includes some ambitious plans to send missions farther from Earth than ever before. Building infrastructure in space and sending regular manned missions to the moon and Mars are top programs.
Beyond that proposal, there are also plans to send robotic missions outside the solar system, to the focal distance of the sun’s gravitational lens, and even to nearby stars to explore exoplanets (planets outside the Solar System). That set of goals requires next-generation propulsion that enables high thrust and consistent acceleration.
Focused laser circuit or directed energy (DE) then lightsail (light sails or Solar sails) is a method that is being researched extensively. These include the Breakthrough Starshot and Swarming Proxima Centauri instruments. Beyond these two, a team from McGill University in Montreal has proposed a new type of directed energy (DE) propulsion system for exploring the solar system.
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In a recent paper, the team shared initial results of the Laser-Thermal Propulsion (LTP) thruster facility. The results show the technology has the potential to provide high thrust and specific impulses for interstellar missions.
The research team was led by Gabriel R Dube, an Undergraduate Research Trainee at the McGill Interstellar Flight Experimental Research Group (IFERG) and Associate Professor Andrew Higgins, IFERG Principal Investigator. Its members are Emmanuel Duplay, postgraduate researcher from Technische Universiteit Delft (TU Delft); Siera Riel, Summer Research Assistant at IFERG; and Jason Loiseau, Associate Professor at the Royal Military College Of Canada.
The team presented their results at the 2024 AIAA Science and Technology Forum and Exhibition, below in the forum paper. Higgins and his colleagues originally proposed this concept in a 2022 paper that appeared in Acta Astronautica dengan judul “Design of a rapid transit to Mars mission using laser-thermal propulsion.”
As reported Universe Today At that time, LTP was inspired by interstellar concepts such as Starshot and Project Dragonfly (NASA’s helicopter that was going to Titan). However, Higgins and his colleagues at McGill are interested in how the same technology could enable a rapid transit mission to Mars in just 45 days, and then to the entire solar system.
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The method, they say, could also validate the technology involved and act as a stepping stone towards interstellar missions (outside the Solar System). As Higgins told Universe Today at the time, the concept came to mind during the Covid-19 pandemic, when they couldn’t get into the lab.
“My students did a detailed conceptual study of how we could use the kind of large laser arrays envisioned for Breakthrough Starshot on short-term missions in the solar system,” he said.
Rather than using the 10-km-diameter, 100-GW laser planned for Breakthrough Starshot, Higgins and team limited it to a 10-meter-diameter, 100-MW laser. Their results show the laser is capable of delivering power to a spacecraft to a distance nearly the same as the moon.
“By heating hydrogen propellant to 10,000 K seconds, lasers could become the ‘holy grail’ of high specific thrust and impulse,” Higgins said.
2024-02-17 09:27:00
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