NASA and China plan to mount crewed missions to Mars in the next decade. While this represents a tremendous leap in terms of space exploration, it also presents significant logistical and technological challenges.
For this application, lasers are used to deliver power to photovoltaic arrays on a spacecraft, which is converted to electricity to power a Hall-Effect Thruster . This idea is similar to a system, where a laser array takes the place of a nuclear reactor. As Duplay explained, their concept is related but different:
In addition to DE and hydrogen propellant, the mission architecture for a laser-thermal spacecraft includes several technologies from other architectures. As Duplay indicated, they include: "The inflatable reflector is a key from other directed-energy architectures: designed to be highly reflective, it can sustain a greater laser power per unit area than a photovoltaic panel, making this mission feasible with a modest laser array size compared to laser-electric propulsion," added Duplay.
At the same time, says Duplay, the mission presents some hurdles since many of the technologies involved are bleeding-edge and have not been tested just yet:
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