![]() “There’s still a lot of work to do and it’s definitely still a technical challenge to actually achieve this. “We’re not saying ‘Oh, this is easy-peasy’,” said Duplay. For example, there would also need to be a laser array on Mars to slow down the spacecraft so that it can land on the red planet. There’s still challenges to overcome to make the concept a reality. ![]() However, he said, the next step is to prove the concept in a laboratory. “The work that is doing is unique, and I think it’s quite promising,” said Lubin. Researchers are now looking to other methods for fast space travel, including with nuclear fusion. According to Lubin, the question behind both his own work and Higgins is this: “How do we do better than chemistry to get things faster to places in the solar system?”Įngines, he said, aren’t being made to go any faster than they already are. Lubin worked on the concept behind the laser arrays that would be necessary to enable Breakthrough Starshot. Higgins worked with Lubin while on sabbatical at UC Santa Barbara in 2018. Philip Lubin, a professor in the physics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, agrees minimizing the hazard to humans on a trip to Mars is a main benefit to the work. Reducing what would be an up to 10-month-long mission down to 45 days would dramatically reduce astronaut radiation exposure. “That is a serious concern for astronauts.” “Once you’re outside the magnetosphere, you’re getting exposed all the time to cosmic rays,” explained Higgins. The International Space Station is inside the magnetosphere and Apollo astronauts’ trips to the Moon only sent them out of the protective field for days at a time. Surrounding Earth is a system of magnetic fields, called the magnetosphere, which effectively blocks solar and cosmic radiation. Higgins explained that a real driving factor behind working to get to Mars so fast is concern for astronaut safety. “That just felt a little more exciting, a little more interesting to me,” he said. With the concept outlined in his paper, the laser could send payloads, useful hardware, and astronaut crews around the solar system. More likely, the biggest challenge is making it economically worthwhile to support a viable colony. He worked on the research as an undergraduate student of Higgins’ at McGill.ĭuplay found himself drawn to the laser-thermal propulsion to Mars concept for its useful purposes. The biggest challenge of our Mars journey is the journey time (9 months). “The interstellar concept is sending a very tiny, tiny probe to take a picture,” explained Emmanuel Duplay, a master’s student in aerospace engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and first author of the paper.
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