NASA’s Interstellar Solar Drive – In Testing!

How do we fly into interstellar space? One of the options is a solar-thermal drive that uses a close maneuver around the Sun and a clever drive that provides a speed of almost 90 kilometers per second.

Image by Steve Bidmead from Pixabay

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We really want to explore the stars. They are just too seductive. And if we can’t go there ourselves, we want to at least send out probes to them. But to do either of those things, we need one hell of a drive. Scientists and engineers from the Applied Physics Laboratory with the John Hopkins University are currently testing such a drive. It uses solar radiation. With its help, we should be able to get spaceships to the periphery of the Solar system and perhaps even to the closest stars.

The research team says that such a solar drive is no longer just a far-fetched dream from science-fiction. For research purposes, they already have a “solar simulator”. This is a modified container with thousands of LEDs installed. It can shine with the power of 20 Suns and it is showing us that a solar drive has a lot of potential.

We want to know what surrounds our Solar system. Even just what is hiding behind the heliopause – one of the boundaries of the Solar system. The problem is that even the heliopause is too far for many kinds of research – especially direct research – and any research further away is even harder. So far, only two of our machines got there – Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 but it took both of them roughly half a century before they got there.

That’s the motivation for the cooperation of NASA and scientists from the Applied Physics Laboratory who are working in a program called Interstellar Probe. They are developing a drive for spaceships that would allow them to be much faster. NASA showcased this cooperation in October of 2019 together with a prediction that a spaceship with a new drive could start its journey into the depths of the Solar system in 2030.

The drive that should change the rules of the game for flights in the Solar system and beyond is a solar-thermal drive. It is an incredible thing. Forget a normal chemical drive. The solar-thermal drive will most likely be built into the thermal shielding of the ship.

Part of how you use this drive is by doing an Oberth maneuver around the Sun. During such a maneuver the ship falls into the gravitational well of the Sun, uses its engines to accelerate even further, and ends up with more speed than it started with. And since it will use hydrogen as its fuel it will also suck up the hydrogen available around the Sun that will expand as it gets closer to the Sun, shooting out of the nozzles at high speeds giving the ship even more speed.

If everything works out correctly then an Interstellar Probe ship should speed up from 13.4 kilometers per second to 89.4 kilometers per second in a single maneuver around the Sun. That’s a nice speed. The one big problem is that during such a maneuver the ship will have to spend about 2 and a half hours in an environment with a temperature of roughly 2500° Celsius. Not even the sophisticated thermal shield that is part of the Parker Solar Probe that is currently studying the Sun.

So what we now need are new materials that will be capable of handling such hellish temperatures while having hydrogen flowing through them. The scientists believe the key to such an ultra-durable thermal shield is 3D-printing metals.

Sources:

• https://www.wired.com/story/a-solar-powered-rocket-might-be-our-ticket-to-interstellar-space/

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