NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts is known for supporting foreign ideas in the fields of astronomy and space exploration. Since its re-establishment in 2011, the Institute has supported a number of projects as part of its three-phase programme.
However, only three projects have so far qualified to receive Phase III funding. And one of them has just released a white paper describing a mission to acquire a telescope that can effectively detect biosignatures on nearby exoplanets using our own Sun’s gravitational lens. Is.
This Phase III distinction comes with US$2 million in funding, which in this case went to JPL, whose scientist, Slava Toryshev, was the principal investigator on the first two phases of the project. He collaborated with The Aerospace Corporation on this latest white paper,
which describes the mission concept in more detail and explains what technologies already exist and what needs to be developed. Further development is required. However, this mission design has several notable features, one of which is touched on in detail in Centauri Dreams.
Instead of launching a large spacecraft that would take a long time to travel anywhere, the proposed mission would launch several smaller cubesats and then assemble them on a 25-year journey to the Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) point.
That “point” is actually a straight line between any star that orbits the exoplanet and 550-1000 AU on the other side of the Sun. That’s a huge distance, far greater than the 156 AU Voyager 1 has taken 44 years to travel so far. So how can a spacecraft travel three times the distance while taking almost half the time? Simply, it will dive into the Sun almost.
Boosting gravity from the Sun is a tried and true method. The fastest man-made object to date, the Parker Solar Probe, used one such technique. However, being scaled up to 25 AU a year, the speed at which this mission would have to travel is not easy.
And it will be even harder for the fleet than just one. The first problem would be material – solar ships, which are the preferred mission mechanism, do not do well when subjected to the intensity of the Sun that would be required for gravity.
In addition, the electronics on the system would have to be much more radiation-hardened than current tech. However, both of these known problems are potential solutions under active research.
Another seemingly obvious problem would be how to coordinate the passage of multiple satellites through such gut-wrenching gravitational maneuvers and still efficiently form a fully functional spacecraft in the end.
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But according to the paper’s authors, a 25-year journey to the observation point would be enough time to actively recombine a single cube set into a coherent whole. What could result from this convergence is a better picture of an exoplanet that humanity is likely to miss out on a full interstellar mission.
Which exoplanet would be the best candidate will be a hotly debated topic if the mission goes ahead, as more than 50 have so far been found in their stars’ habitable zones. But it’s certainly not a guarantee yet. The mission has received no funding and there is no indication that it will do so in the near future.
And many technologies will have to be developed before such a mission is feasible. But it is only right that such missions are always launched, and have the greatest possible impact.
With luck, sometime in the next few decades, we’ll likely get as crisp a picture of potentially habitable exoplanets as we’re likely to get in the medium future. The team behind this research deserves credit for coming up with such an idea in the first place.
