Project Icarus aims to update the Daedalus design with new technologies and ideas. Project Icarus is designed to reach any star within 22 light-years of Earth that has a potentially habitable exoplanet, meaning if a planet is confirmed around Proxima Centauri, it could become a target destination. The Project Daedalus concepts from the 1970s are the inspiration for Project Icarus, an ongoing joint project by the British Interplanetary Society and the Icarus Interstellar organization, an international network of scientists, engineers and enthusiasts who hope to develop the capabilities for interstellar spaceflight by the year 2100. While Crawford thinks the science behind the Project Daedalus concept is better understood now than when the spacecraft was designed, he said the immense cost and enormous technical challenges likely mean it would be more than 100 years before something like the Daedalus sets out for the stars. The Daedalus would be much too large to lift off from the Earth’s surface, so it would have to be built in orbit, which means spacecraft like this couldn’t be built without a capacity for construction in space that doesn’t exist today, said space scientist Ian Crawford, a professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck College in the United Kingdom. Even so, the engines would consume tens of thousands of tons of fuel to get the spacecraft up to its top speed in about 4 years - and because there wouldn’t be any fuel left to slow down, the end result of the 50-year journey would be just a 70-hour flyby of the destination system, before the spacecraft speeds past into interstellar space. The rockets of the Daedalus spacecraft would be powered by nuclear fusion, using electron beams to detonate a stream of pellets of fuel such as helium-3, which could be mined from the surface of the moon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |