Tag Archives: spacecraft

Space mirrors best way to deflect asteroids

Asteroid deflection with space mirrors The best way to deflect incoming asteroids? Forget nuclear blasts, "gravity tractors" or  Bruce Willis or Clint Eastwood in a souped-up space shuttle: according to a new study at the University of Glasgow, focusing sunlight onto an asteroid with space-based mirrors is the way to go.

Mind you, it would take 5000 space mirrors to fend off something of the size the killed off the dinosaurs–more than five kilometres across–but you wouldn’t need nearly as many for smaller ones. (Via New Scientist Space.)

Other options considered in the study: ramming a spacecraft into the asteroid at high speed, digging up pieces of it and shooting them off into space, attaching a thruster, or painting one side to cause trajectory-deflecting uneven heat radiation. (Illustration: M Vasile et al, University of Glasgow.)

[tags]spacecraft, asteroids, planetary defense[/tags]

Space travel without propellant

800px-Aurora-SpaceShuttle-EO

"Fuel? We won’t need no stinkin’ fuel for our spacecraft!" might be the motto of the Cornell Planetary Magnetic Fields Propulsion research team. Led by Dr. Mason Peck, the team envisions spacecraft that would be able to surf planetary magnetic fields, requiring little if any propellant. The effect to be harnessed, known as Lorentz forces, is small, so the spacecraft would likewise have to be small: imagine a swarm of millions of craft, each the size and mass of a single silicon wafer, gathering information, providing communications, or creating a distributed-aperture telescope kilometres in diameter. Such tiny, lightweight craft might even be perfect for the first trip to another star system. (Via Centauri Dreams.)

Hey, at 1/10th light speed, Proxima Centauri is only 43 years away… (Photo from NASA via Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]space travel, propulsion, spacecraft, technology[/tags]