Sentences with phrase «light sail»

Humans are currently experimenting with light sail technology that uses light from the sun.

The function performed by the imagined structures is to move alien vehicles using light sails, in which powerful light beams propel a reflective surface in the vacuum of space.

If nothing else, the possibility of sending light sails to orbit many nearby stars suggests a natural next - generation, longer - term follow - up to Starshot's more urgent mission goals.

As for the ultimate goals for light sail technology, Johnson said he'd like to see them used as «pole sitters».

Starshot's tentative plans involve using conventional rockets to place thousands of one - gram, four - meter - wide light sails in Earth orbit as early as the 2040s.

«The thing would look like the chip from your cell phone with this very thin gauzy light sail,» said Pete Worden, the former director of NASA's Ames Research Center, who is leading the project.

«In using starlight to reach relativistic speeds, one must use an extremely thin sail,» Loeb says, noting that the weaker push of sunlight calls for a correspondingly lower - density light sail.

But the twin stars» radiation pressure has its limits; if Heller's and Hippke's 100,000 - square - mter light sail came in any faster than 4.6 percent light - speed, it would simply overshoot the system.

Rather than using multibillion - dollar laser arrays to boost small light sails to relativistic speeds for one - time flybys, Heller and Hippke propose using starlight alone to send larger sails on more leisurely journeys that would take them to all three stars in the Alpha Centauri system and leave them parked in orbits there.

Alpha Centauri's 80 - year triple - alignment next occurs in 2035, far too soon for any conceivable light sail from Earth to be anywhere close to the system; instead, Heller and Hippke suggest it might be more realistic to target the subsequent alignment, in 2115.

The massive star Sirius, for example, is just over twice as far away as Alpha Centauri — but because it shines some 25 times brighter than our sun, it offers a stronger radiation - pressure braking effect, allowing light sails to approach at much higher speeds.

The crux of their proposal is not only to use sunlight to accelerate outbound light sails, but also rely on the light and gravitation of Alpha Centauri's triple stars at journey's end.

They argue that the most plausible use of such power is driving interstellar light sails.

Theoretically, the autonomous, active light sail proposed by Heller and Hippke could settle into a bound orbit around Alpha Centauri A and possibly explore its planets.

Crossing the huge distance between the Sun and Alpha Centauri using current spacecraft technologies would take several millennia, though the possibility of nuclear pulse propulsion or laser light sail technology, as considered in the Breakthrough Starshot program, could reduce the journey time to a matter of decades.

Researchers sketched dozens of models, employing the gamut of astrophysical mysteries — from flare stars in our own galaxy to exploding stars, mergers of charged black holes, white holes, evaporating black holes, oscillating primordial cosmic strings, and even aliens sailing through the cosmos using extragalactic light sails.

Basically, the authors of the study — Avi Loeb and Manasvi Lingam — state that the millisecondlong FRBs may be the result of a sufficiently advanced alien civilization trying to power spacecraft equipped with light sails (something that scientists have also thought about doing).

Our analysis shows that beams used for powering large light sails could yield parameters that are consistent with FRBs,» the researchers wrote in the study.

Sailing between London and Bergen starting in January 2019 and called In Search of the Northern Lights sailing on Viking's third 930 - guest ocean ship, Viking Sky.

A proposal to spread life says we should use giant lasers and light sails to send microbes out to them

Breakthrough Starshot is an ambitious existing proposal to use giant lasers and light sails to send tiny probes to Alpha Centauri.

To reach the potentially habitable planet Proxima b, these «photogravitational» assists counterintuitively require first sending the light sail swooping blisteringly close to the bright, sunlike stars Alpha Centauri A and B — even though they are nearly two trillion kilometers farther from us than Proxima b's smaller, dimmer host star, Proxima Centauri.

Called Breakthrough Starshot, the initiative calls for largely abandoning rockets in favor of «light sails» — gossamer - thin reflective sheets that, once unfolded in space, could be propelled to very high speeds by laser beams.

As they fall deeper into the dark between the stars, the light sails would attempt to transmit their precious findings back to Earth using laser beams no more powerful than the signal from a typical cell phone.

Moreover, the light sails that survive the 20 - year voyage would pass through the Centauri system in a flash, moving so fast they would have only seconds to capture high - quality close - up images and other data from Proxima b and any neighboring planets that may be there.

This is because the greater radiation pressure from Alpha Centauri A and B provides more deceleration, and thus a faster approach, for any light sail targeting the system.

Leik Myrabo at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute turned science fiction into reality by demonstrating that a light sail could be propelled by photons emitted by a laser in a vacuum, which may lead to rapid interstellar travel.

To power a light sail, the transmitter would need to focus a beam on it continuously.

The spacecraft will use a light sail.

Since this spacecraft is, essentially, an integrated circuit on a light sail, that's an issue.

When a photon collides with an object such as a light sail, it transfers some of that momentum to the object.

It proposes to use the $ 100 million to learn whether it's possible to use a 100 - gigawatt light beam and light sails to propel some 1,000 ultra-lightweight nanocraft to 20 % of light speed.