2 ms·
If some other civilization is sending out such spacecraft, would we be able to detect the relativistic light sails somehow? There was some paper a few years ago
by bediger4000 2y ago
If some other civilization is sending out such spacecraft, would we be able to detect the relativistic light sails somehow? There was some paper a few years ago about detecting Bussard ramjets, but I can't find it right now.
- PaulHoule 2y agoThe probe basically goes in a straight line so you'd imagine you can see the laser is pointing at you, although it's going to be just a bit off-center because of proper motion, they're going to have to aim where the Earth is going to be when the probe arrives, though if the beam is wide enough we'd see it anyway. I'd be worried about the survival of the probe. I gave a presentation about Earth-Sun L1 sunshades and pointed out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS as an example of what it would look like but somebody in the audience pointed out that IKAROS didn't survive that long. Such a probe would be moving through the interstellar medium at great speed and would get blasted by high-speed particles and wouldn't be thick enough to have a lot of shielding.