The Radical Propulsion Needed to Catch the Solar Gravitational Lens Sending a mission to the Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) is the most effective way of actually directly imaging a potentially habitable planet, as well as its atmosphere, and even possibly some of its cities. But, the SGL is somewhere around 650-900 AU away, making it almost 4 times farther than even Voyager 1 has traveled - and that’s the farthest anything human has made it so far. It will take Voyager 1 another 130+ years to reach the SGL, so obviously traditional propulsion methods won’t work to get any reasonably sized craft there in any reasonable timeframe. A new paper by an SGL mission’s most vocal proponent, Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, walks through the different types of propulsion methods that might eventually get us there - and it looks like we would have a lot of work to do if we plan to do it anytime soon.

The Radical Propulsion Needed to Catch the Solar Gravitational Lens #Science #Space #SpaceTechnology #SolarGravitationalLens #SpaceExploration #PropulsionTechnology

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AI is tranforming spacecraft propulsion—and may lead to nuclear-powered rockets Every year, companies and space agencies launch hundreds of rockets into space—and that number is set to grow dramatically with ambitious missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But these dreams hinge...

AI is tranforming spacecraft propulsion—and may lead to nuclear-powered rockets #Technology #EmergingTechnologies #NuclearPropulsion #AI #SpaceTech #PropulsionTechnology

Concept Demonstration of Directed Energy Propulsion with Metasurface Lightsails 1 min readPreparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) ECF 2024 Quadchart Ilic.pdf Ognjen Ilic University of Minnesota This effort will aim to demonstrate the feasibility of directed-energy...

Concept Demonstration of Directed Energy Propulsion with Metasurface Lightsails #Science #Physics #AppliedPhysics #DirectedEnergy #Metasurfaces #PropulsionTechnology