{"id":30974,"date":"2016-10-12T04:46:37","date_gmt":"2016-10-12T11:46:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/10\/spherical-shell-laser-sail-would-simplify-interstellar-laser-sails"},"modified":"2017-06-04T14:09:56","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T21:09:56","slug":"spherical-shell-laser-sail-would-simplify-interstellar-laser-sails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/10\/spherical-shell-laser-sail-would-simplify-interstellar-laser-sails","title":{"rendered":"Spherical shell laser sail would simplify interstellar laser sails"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/spherical-shell-laser-sail-would-simplify-interstellar-laser-sails.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1609.09506\" target=\"blank\">The stability of a light sail riding on a laser beam is analyzed both analytically and numerically. Conical sails on Gaussian beams,<\/a> which have been studied in the past, are shown to be unstable in general. A new architecture for a passively stable sail and beam configuration is proposed. The novel spherical shell sail design is capable of \u201cbeam riding\u201d without the need for active feedback control. Full three-dimensional ray-tracing simulations are performed to verify our analytical results.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/1609.09506v1.pdf\" target=\"blank\">Arxiv \u2014 Stability of a Light Sail Riding on a Laser Beam (6 pages by Zachary Manchester, Abraham Loeb of Harvard)<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\\'blog-photo\\' href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/spherical-shell-laser-sail-would-simplify-interstellar-laser-sails2.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" border=\"0\" height=\"640\" src=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/spherical-shell-laser-sail-would-simplify-interstellar-laser-sails2.jpg\" width=\"514\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nextbigfuture.com\/2016\/10\/spherical-shell-laser-sail-would.html\">http:\/\/www.nextbigfuture.com\/2016\/10\/spherical-shell-laser-sail-would.html<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The stability of a light sail riding on a laser beam is analyzed both analytically and numerically. Conical sails on Gaussian beams, which have been studied in the past, are shown to be unstable in general. A new architecture for a passively stable sail and beam configuration is proposed. The novel spherical shell sail design [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":354,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30974"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66026,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30974\/revisions\/66026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}