How a Beam of Pellets Could Blast a Probe Into Deep Space
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Loading... - Lezcano Ace
- 28 Mar 2023
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IF YOU WANT a spacecraft that can explore beyond the solar system—and you don’t want to wait decades for it to get there—you need one that can really move. Today’s chemical rockets and solar-powered probes are downright poky on interstellar scales. Artur Davoyan has a completely different idea for how to accelerate a spacecraft to extreme speeds: pellet-beam propulsion.
Here’s the gist of how it would work: First, you actually need two spacecraft. A probe blasts off on a one-way trip to deep space, while a second vehicle remains locked in an Earth orbit and fires thousands of tiny metallic pellets at its partner every second. The orbiting craft also either fires a 10-megawatt laser beam at the retreating probe, or aligns a laser fired from the ground at it. The laser hits the pellets, heats them, and ablates them, so that part of their material melts and becomes plasma—a hot cloud of ionized particles. That plasma accelerates the pellet remnants, and this pellet beam provides thrust to the spacecraft.
