Project Dragonfly is working towards the achievement of interstellar flight through laser sail technology
Project Dragonfly is a feasibility study for a space mission to another star. It is conducted by the Initiative for Interstellar Studies I4IS. The goal is to send a robotic spacecraft to another star, in order to explore exoplanets, other star systems, the interstellar medium and discover potential life.
Today, we live in a unique period of time: we may soon have the technological capabilities to build and launch a spacecraft to the stars. Isn’t that amazing? Humanity has existed for over 200,000 years and now we live in a time where we can work towards going to the stars. More precisely, scientists and engineers have been working on approaches to get to the stars since about 50 years.
Many previous approaches for going to the stars have depended on extremely large and heavy spacecraft, based on concepts such as nuclear propulsion systems, for example nuclear fusion or antimatter. Besides the technological barriers to realising these propulsion systems, they have another disadvantage: they all have to carry their fuel with them, which is then burnt to generate the propulsive thrust. As interstellar travel requires velocities at least of a couple of percent of the speed of light, large quantities of fuel are required. And by large, we mean really large! Existing concepts of fusion-propelled spacecraft are as heavy as skyscrapers.
Accelerating all the fuel which is ultimately burnt is actually not a very efficient way to get to the stars
Project Dragonfly aims at a different approach: the spacecraft will not carry any propellant with them. But how can you propel a spacecraft without any propellant? The answer is that you use an external source of energy. The basic idea is not new - it is, in fact, very old. For centuries, humans have travelled the seas using sailing ships. We also plan to use a sail. But a sail which is made of an extremely thin reflective surface. This sail would be illuminated by a laser beam from a laser power station somewhere in the solar system. The photons of the laser beam push the sail, similar to the wind pushing a sail of a sail ship. And by pushing the sail, the spacecraft slowly accelerates. However, as the spacecraft does not use any on-board fuel, it can accelerate to very high velocities in the range of several percent of the speed of light.
Furthermore, Project Dragonfly builds upon the recent trend of miniaturisation of space systems. Just a few decades ago, thousands of people were involved in developing the first satellite Sputnik. Today, a handful of university students are able to build a satellite with the same capability as Sputnik, which is much cheaper and weighs hundreds of times less than the first satellite. We simply think further. What could we do with the technologies in about 20-30 years from now? Would it be possible to build spacecraft that can go to the stars but are as small as today’s picosatellites or even smaller?
Why a competition?
Usually space engineers develop a preliminary engineering design. They use this initially study to see if such a mission is indeed possible and what technologies are needed. If the study is deemed feasible, investments in developing the required technologies and in hiring and training the right people can be made.
Thus, an engineering design is the first step towards realizing an interstellar mission. This is exactly the purpose of the Project Dragonfly Design Competition. Five international university teams are currently working on studies for a small laser-propelled interstellar spacecraft. The final design reports of the teams shall cover all areas, which are relevant to make the mission a success and to return scientific data from such a mission: instruments, communication, laser sail design, power supply, secondary structure, deceleration propulsion etc. Furthermore, the technological as well as economic feasibility of the architecture shall be assessed by the teams. The teams and i4is will meet in London later this year in order to evaluate their designs
The results from the competition shall serve as a basis for future technology development for the realisation of such a mission. With the increasing interest in cubesats and solar sails, this is becoming ever more likely.
The Teams
Five universities from all around the world are currently participating in the contest: Cairo University, Technical University of Munich, University of California Santa Barbara, Cranfield University and Toronto University. To give you an idea of why they joined and who they are, we would like to introduce them to you:
The Team from the Technical University of Munich is a sub group of the WARR, the Scientific Research Group for Rocketry and Spaceflight that engages in Interstellar Studies. The members of Interstellar Spaceflight group are (from top left to top right) Johannes Breitenbach, Martin Losekamm, Lukas Schrenk, Nikolas Perakis, Artur Koop and Johannes Gutsmiedl. Apart from Martin Losekamm who studies applied physics they are all aerospace technology students.
The team CranSEDS consists of students enrolled at the Cranfield University-UK , UPS-France and Skoltech-Russia. It encompasses students from various backgrounds currently pursuing graduate degrees in astronautics and space engineering at the aforementioned institutions. Overall about 10 different nationalities are represented within the team.
The team from the University of California Santa Barbara consists of Philip Lubin, Kyle McDonough, Caio Motta, Alex Lang, Sebastian Arias and Travis Brashears (from left upper corner anti-clockwise on picture).
The Cairo team consists of a number of highly motivated and active aerospace and communication engineering students. They all have been involved with conceptual and practical projects in the past. Moreover, a number of them contributed voluntarily to technical and non-technical magazines and societies, like the Space generation Advisory Council. Very recently, they also participated in the NASA Space Apps challenge 2015. Their university is currently the only one in Egypt engaging in Aerospace sciences and through their work they hope to interest more people in related topics and convey its importance for future generations.
You can donate to the project on their Kickstarter