Mars is likely the next extraterrestrial target for humans to visit in the coming decades, but such a journey would take around nine months to arrive using standard chemical rockets. Now, a NASA physicist has proposed a revolutionary laser propulsion system that would complete the trip in just 30 days. Refinements of this theory suggest the time for a journey to the red planet could be reduced to just three days – or perhaps a mere 30 minutes.
Chemical propulsion systems currently in use are dependent on the relative positions of Earth and Mars to deliver payloads in a reasonable amount of time. Still, such a manned mission would require 260 days to shuttle humans to our nearest planetary neighbor.
A proposal describing a method to bring a payload to Mars in just half an hour was described at NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) conference held in October 2015.
Such a craft would be launched into space where a large solar sail would be deployed. An immensely powerful laser orbiting Earth would fire a beam directly at the sail, propelling the vehicle. With little resistance, such a craft could quickly accelerate to a significant portion of the speed of light. Theoretically, a vehicle using this design could accelerate to 45,000 miles per second (25 percent of the speed of light) in just a few minutes.
“We propose a roadmap to a program that will lead to sending relativistic probes to the nearest stars and will open up a vast array of possibilities of flight both within our solar system and far beyond… These systems can be propelled to speeds currently unimaginable with existing propulsion technologies. To do so requires a fundamental change in our thinking of both propulsion and in many cases what a spacecraft is,” Philip Lubin, a physics professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, wrote.
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