Collision risk prediction for constellation design

Lucken, Romain; Giolito, Damien

doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2019.04.003

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…First, if N s becomes exceedingly high, transporting such a large number of light sails to the astrophysical source from the parent system would pose difficulties; alternatively, one may attempt to construct them in situ but this is contingent on the availability of raw materials. Second, we have deliberately adopted a conservative value of φ s in ( 43), but even this miniscule fraction has a certain risk of the spacecrafts colliding with one another (Lucken & Giolito 2019), and potentially triggering a collisional cascade known as the "Kessler syndrome" (Kessler & Cour-Palais 1978). While this risk is probably not a major concern for φ s ≈ φ 0 (Bradley & Wein 2009;Drmola & Hubik 2018), it will become increasingly prominent at higher choices of φ s (Sallmen et al 2019), unless it can be overcome by an exceptional degree of spacecraft coordination and control.…”

Section: Number Of Sails Per Sourcementioning

confidence: 99%

Propulsion of Spacecrafts to Relativistic Speeds Using Natural Astrophysical Sources

Lingam,

Loeb

2020

Preprint

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In this paper, we explore the possibility of using natural astrophysical sources to accelerate spacecrafts to relativistic speeds from a conceptual standpoint. We focus on light sails and electric sails, which are reliant on momentum transfer from photons and protons, respectively, because these two classes of spacecrafts are not required to carry fuel on board. The payload is assumed to be stationed near the astrophysical source, and the sail is subsequently unfolded and activated when the source is functional. By considering a number of astrophysical objects such as massive stars, microquasars, supernovae, pulsar wind nebulae, and active galactic nuclei, we show that terminal speeds approaching the speed of light might be realizable under idealized circumstances provided that sufficiently advanced sail materials and control techniques exist. We also investigate the constraints arising from the sail's material properties, the voyage through the ambient source environment, and the passage through the interstellar medium. While all of these considerations pose significant challenges to spacecrafts, our analysis indicates that they are not insurmountable in optimal conditions. Finally, we sketch the implications for carrying out future technosignature searches.

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