Swarms of Cheap Spacecraft for Solar System Exploration 

He's very soft-spoken, seems like a nice guy and very smart at the same time...I like the people who work in this field. Hopefully these solar sails happen...while we wait for better technologies to get us to explore extra-solar planets.

$1000 per spacecraft brings their use into the range of almost any research group - it would be fantastic for increasing access to space exploration.

A fleet of solar sails and tiny robots sounds so cool! That was a super interesting interview!

Yeah sadly solar sails are pretty good in a couple AU bubble around Earth up to about Mars and then the photon pressure drops off heavily past Mars and from there solar wind sails become more viable (electric/magnetic/plasma sails) especially for rapid fast flyby exploration due to being able to travel possibly up to 8-10 AU per year as NASA's HERTS concept described but then the issue becomes power since solar panels won't be effective past Jupiter... Also statite is the word you're thinking of for a stationary solar sail, able to move in non-Keplerian orbits or just hover over a celestial body, its so unbelievably cool I can't believe noone has tried it yet.

That would be a good way to test it before you send them beyond our solar system. I would love to see them send them to parts of the solar system that are unexplored in the near future.

Great interview, solar sails have been distracting my daydreams and navigating my nightdreams ever since another interview a year or so ago.

I missed your videos the last few days, but you have been spoiling us recently so a few days without a video makes sense. These videos give me enjoyment in my life.

Great interview. Best of luck to everyone working on these ideas!

For Marshall Eubanks's Starshot project .... 1. Sending just 1000 probes is fatally timid. We should think in terms of *millions* of identical probes. Produced in volume, their price-per drops to near nothing. The cost of a million probes is small vs. the cost of the project overall. The entire probe could have just one chip plus a couple of capacitors and coils. 2. Launching just one probe swarm would be supremely wasteful. Given solar-powered, orbital launch apparatus, we have no reason to turn it off: keep launching probes throughout the life of the mission. Over the next 20 years, launch 1000 probes (or more: 10,000, 50,000) *each week*. Having reached cruising speed, probes turn to fly edge-on, minimizing erosion. 3. A launch laser may be a simple laser cavity, or maybe better a bundle of billions of laser cavities, pumped with sunlight reflected from an array of monochromatic mirrors ranged around it, with no conversion loss. Monochromatic mirrors are easily produced by depositing alternating layers of transparent material with different dielectric constant but identical thickness. Given continuous operation throughout the mission, a much lower power output (10GW? 1GW?) becomes wholly adequate. 4. But consider the alternative of launching with an array of masers, instead. Masers are much more easily constructed and operated. An array of independent masers, distributed around the sun, can be held in phase with the aid of atomic clocks, and would present less possibility of threat to Earth. 5. With the launch apparatus operating throughout the mission, there is no need to accelerate to cruising speed immediately. This allows a much lesser beam intensity, and radically reduces G loading on the probes. But we can keep building more launchers indefinitely, and find good uses for them. 6. There is no value in having probes formed up in a plane at the destination. A dispersed cloud of a million probes flying through continuously for 20 years offers enormously greater value. The first few thousand through the system can identify interesting bodies, and subsequent swarms can tack against starlight and concentrate on those. This eliminates the "predict position of planetary bodies" problem. 7. Launching continuously, later probes will be better than the first ones. Those farthest out are more primitive, but those passing the target get increasingly capable, continuously, as in "Ender's Game". 8. Probes spend almost all their flight time close to zero K. This creates design opportunities denied to other projects. The sail surface may be an atomically thin wafer of superconductor, providing perfect reflection of any long-enough wavelength, stiffened by its own field. (Superconductors exhibit perfect reflection up to the photon energy matching their band gap; known materials may reflect microwaves perfectly.) 9. Trying to transmit data home via laser would be a monumental blunder: the starlight behind the probes interferes with any optical signal. Much worse, at optical frequency, phased-array transmission by clouds of probes is impossible. But at ordinary radio frequency, a swarm may transmit as a phased array with no difficulty, having triangulated their relative positions and maybe synchronized to a pilot signal from home. Receivers throughout the asteroid belt may remain synchronized to operate as a phased array using atomic clocks (as was used to image M87). They can easily listen to all swarms, in all directions, at the same time. 10. There is no need for probes at the destination to transmit their data all the way home. They need only send to the next swarm coming up a light-day or light-week behind, which relays data to the next. 11. Upon approaching the destination, the swarm may focus incident light (laser/maser/starlight) on a few, selected probes to slow them down enough to enter orbit. Subsequent swarms flying through can provide phased-array communication, and assist altering their orbits, with the occasional additional new probe joining them. Visiting a bright star would be a better choice, for this purpose. 12. With two swarms sent out in different directions, you get a phased-array radio telescope light-years across that could (e.g.) image the surface of a pulsar, using the pulsar itself to synchronize. I sent a version of the above to the address in the paper, but have not heard a peep back.

I love these ideas. I hope it comes to fruition. I think manned spaceflight to the moon and mars is a nonsense. Expensive, complicated, and dangerous. This will reap huge rewards for very low cost.

Fantastic concept! I wish Alexander well with this and future endeavours!

I've always wondered if a solar sail could double as a dish antenna for sending and receiving radio signals back and forth from the spacecraft. Sail propulsion/Antenna, gives you one or the other for free other than a little engineering up front. Using cheap off the shelf stuff I don't see why there are not loads of them already plying the solar system or at least a handful proving the concept asap. Easy for me to say I can hardly afford to launch a party balloon 🎈 in the back yard.

I wish they would use project starshot for exploring the kuiper belt objects such as Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Orcus and Sedna. I really want to know what these worlds look like and sending lots of these tiny, less expensive, very fast probes would probably make it possible to see these worlds with our own eyes within our lifetimes.

BLISS: Interplanetary exploration with swarms of low-cost spacecraft Acta Astronautica Volume 215, February 2024, Pages 348-361

Fascinating interview, Fraser! Thanks a bunch! 😃 I hope they succeed! I'd love to see it! Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊

Pardon my french but this is the one project that gives me a chub

Great interview, looking forward to seeing this launch in the future.

Solar sails are such an interesting concept.

Cool interview. That guy needs to be more excited!

Loads of solar sails sound amazing

How will they power the return flight?

Him and Eubanks need to talk

Great interview

Lightweight solar sail probes, on a slingshot around the Sun, could reach a velocity of 30 AU/yr or the Kuiper belt in two years, they are thus ideal for the exploration of the Solar System. But Alpha Centauri? C'mon - Proxima Centauri b is at a distance of 4,2 light years or 265.612,5 AU. And that means it would take some 8.854 years for the probe to reach the exoplanet. That's a no go, folks!

Keep them close. We could use the shade.

If you mounted a laser on the spacecraft, you could have the spacecraft boost each other. Neat.

Where and how do they get power? Almost impossible to think of a solution at that weight and size. Perhaps Perovskite solar paint, but the cost would go way up. Nickel-63 isotope battery is about the right size but would probably be too heavy and again pretty costly.

What if 1000 of these small probes were sent from Alpha Centauri to explore our solar system. What potential damage could they cause? Would we think it was an invasion or attack? Would we even notice them considering their size, speed and just how large space is?

Keep trying no matter how much your not able to achieve the goals you want to achieve through the current technology leave a strong beacon of hope behind everytime you go out until your able to make it possible for another form of technology to be able to prevail in the place of the current technology being used which we know isnt enough to get us to where we want though it is neccessary for the current technology to exist in order for the newer technology to be able to gain a foothold in order to perform its task.

Great video👍

This is exactly how things should work. No need to send thousands of tons of metal to another star. Such a complicated thing as human stems from a some milligrams of initial matter. We need sending a program, a dna, a blueprint of stuff not a stuff itself. Every required atom of any element can be found in place

Thanks!

Bro said he's obsessed with graduating...he is really in the trenches right now lol. All of us with with science/ engineering degrees can relate!

Maybe using the solar sail to also server as an antenna or device to reflect light or data back towards earth and at the same time serve as a sail to propel the exploration craft forward?

They could do some interesting interferometry on the way

That's called a statite if a solar sail does station keeping balancing out the sun's gravity.

Imagine the size of the swarm which would fit inside a Starship fairing.

I wonder if this would be good for getting to lower gravity moons like the smaller ones around the gas giants.

Good pun, Fraser: "...that's where I think that solar sails really shine..." (~ 16:50). I think that this approach to space matter investigation is very interesting, indeed. The interview gives many things to consider on how these mini solar sail probes could be utilized and improvements to them... Thanks for keeping these interesting interviews coming - Cheers from Seattle!

thanks reverend kane

was a little hard to hear him. the idea is a good one. hope they get as interested in capturing pictures and spectrographs

I'd like to see a swarm of ice melting torpedo craft, to hit all the suspected frozen oceans around our solar system.

Could these small solar sails act as relays between satellites or space telescopes?

Crazy.. It's the guy from the kingdom from the walking dead tv show

How do you radiation-harden the electronics without adding a lot of weight?

Hi sir nice work! 🇱🇰😀👩‍🚀👨‍🚀🚀⚘🌱

According to Wiki New Horizons had 2.1 meter Antenna, 12Watt transmitter. The craft had a communication rate of 38 kbit/s at Jupiter; at Pluto's distance, a rate of approximately 1 kbit/s per transmitter was expected. 70meter dish on earth had to be used to receive faint signal that came from Pluto. How do they expect to send any signal from such a tiny spacecraft, that will not be lost to noise in the solar system? And I'm not sure if a dish the size of solar system would be sufficient to receive any signal from Alfa centauri, that is transmitted using power in the milliwatt range. Pluto is 4.5 light hours away, Alfa centauri is 4 light years away.

I'm worried about robustness and failures rates. Of course if you aren't breaking it, you are not trying to find the limits of what this concept is capable of And he's talking about 1% That's probably too flimsy I think we're prepared to accept between 10 and 50 percent success

With our solar system is traveling around the center of our galaxy at 720,000 kph, how much has changed in our night sky over the last 4.5B years?

🤣😂😆"Chrysler K car" from back in the 1980's lmao ....my neighbor literally drives one everyday, still !!

Not really a space question but how much water is displaced by all the boats and ships in the ocean?

Firing the laser through the ionisphere seems like a bad idea

stationkeeping: that's a "statite", invented by Robert Forward.

imagine, we launch then for one year? then we would get a 3d picture of the solar system

Rather than return them, send up relay sats.

They could aim for half the speed of light if they take this approach to discovery:)

These laser driven sails,how are they gonna stop at the destination exactly?

More than one linked rocket can give us strong enough travel to go there

Hiro Hamada's MicroBots are a revolutionary invention that would have application on a comet, I'm sure.

The Ferrari or... Miata! 🤣

Comment 👏 for 👏 the 👏 algorithm.

its like... Bill and Tedd talk science

How far did he say they could go again in AUs?

How do solar sails fly towards the sun?

You guys could be brothers

Wonder why they don’t send these mini space ships out to all the planets so they can be studied in real time put them into orbit around these alien worlds and even beyond to all the trans Neptunian object and dwarf planets in the outer fringes of our solar system

Space post Malone

I wonder what our nightsky will look like once thousands of solar sails are all over the solar system. Would the skies sparkle in the solar systems plane? Would we be able to see reflections of them? Nice thought and I so hope that small probes will be a thing soon.

So he's not really thought out the minutiae of it, he's just gotten really high and came up with a great sounding idea

Ants!

One word: STARSHIP.

Be a good plot for a sci-fi movie... send out heaps of AI computers into space... what comes back ??? 🤔😂😎🇦🇺👌

Hmm, weird..

Polluting the Earth and beyond.

Moon laser repete repeller stations.

This sounds like a disposal nightmare. Hopefully we wouldn't do the space junk thing if we started out this time.

You can definitely tell by listening to this guy from UC Berkeley try to explain the science behind these solar sails and this mission that he was a DEI admission / hire. We have to get back to a meritocracy at these stem colleges.

Yeah, a swarm of tiny Cyberdyne Systems bots crawling all over my desk, gathering intel on me... Hard Pass.

Fire some of these in the direction of Rama, I mean, “Omuamua”

He’s obsessed with his beard! 😂

Statite.

100% bootleg post Malone, if it isn't his brother that is.

utter bollocks

This kinda bored me. Well, that's the risk of doing interviews with researchers who aren't very animated. And because of the restricted 1.2 AU range, I see little real science capabilities.

For 10-15 years they talk about this but nothing happens... Another bla bla bla subject.