Laser-boosted Solar Sails to 61 Virginis?
I've just read this article and watched the accompanying video. Heady stuff, for sure. I'm particularly intrigued by the concept of a "solar gravitational lens telescope" somewhere out near the heliopause. I'm surprised this isn't bigger news.
I don't know how to effectively read the charts, nor interpret what they're telling me even if I did. Conceptually I grasp it, though; at least I think I do.
So, let's say we got really serious about sending a manned mission to a nearby star. In this scenario, we've determined without a doubt that there is an advanced civilization living on a planet orbiting 61 Virginis, which is (per Wikipedia) 27.9 light years away.
Many questions come to mind, and I need to break this idea up into several "questions", but here they are a few that are related:
Given sufficient funding to build and deploy up to three space-based lasers in the solar system, where should they be "placed" (orbited) to best accelerate a ship?
Given the above placements, how large are the launch windows to use the lasers?
How often do the launch windows come around?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/39201. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
The lasers will need energy. A lot of energy. Possibly several terawatts of energy each. So you'll need to put them somewhere they can get energy. So put them in orbit around one of the gas giants, probably Saturn because of how hostile Jupiter's radiation is, and use the gas giant as fuel to power the laser.
The lasers will be in orbit, which means that you'll have between 1 and 2 with line of sight to the space ship at all times. So as they get line of site they will aim their laser at where the ship will be when the light gets that far.
Maintenance can happen while the laser is behind the planet. The people working on the lasers can live on Titan, which actually has a dense atmosphere, though it's very cold.
The ship will be traveling toward where Virginis will be a thousand years, give or take, but the lasers will only really be pushing them for the first hundred or two, before they get to far away for the light to do much good.
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