Sailing Towards the Stars Close to the Speed of Light

TL;DR

This paper models the physics and practical considerations of radiation-driven sails accelerated near light speed, exploring interstellar and Solar System missions, highlighting challenges like misalignment, energy costs, and relativistic effects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of relativistic sail acceleration, including practical applications, misalignment effects, and energy considerations for interstellar and Solar System missions.

Findings

Misalignment causes deviations of about 80 A.U. at 0.2c.

Interstellar trip to Alpha Centauri takes 22-33 years.

Solar System trip from Earth to Mars takes about 7 months.

Abstract

The authors describe the general motion of radiation-pushed sails accelerated near the speed of light with directed energy propulsion. Practical applications of the model are also given, including the interstellar flyby mission to the Alpha Centauri star system envisioned by the Breakthrough Starshot program. Any misalignment between the driving light beam and the direction of the sail's motion is naturally swept away during acceleration toward relativistic speed, yet leads to a deviation of about 80 A.U. in the case of an initial misalignment of 1 arc sec for a sail accelerated up to 0.2c toward Alpha Centauri. Then, the huge proper acceleration felt by the probes (of order 2500 g), the tremendous energy cost (of about 13 kt per probe) for poor efficiency (of about 3 \%), the trip duration (between 22 and 33 years), the temperature at thermodynamic equilibrium (about 1500 K), and the time dilation aboard (about 160-days difference) are all presented and their variation with the sail's reflectivity is discussed. We also present an application to single trips within the Solar System using double-stage light sails. A spaceship of mass 24 tons can start from Earth and stop at Mars in about seven months with a peak velocity of 30 km/s but at the price of a huge energy cost of about $5.3\times 10^4$ GWh due to extremely low efficiency of the directed energy system, around $10^{-4}$ in this low-velocity case.