A pair of Russian scientists has concocted a method for using ground-based lasers to provide additional thrust to conventional spacecraft and aircraft, potentially making such vehicles much faster than they are today.
The new system "integrates a laser-ablation propulsion system with the gas-blasting nozzles of a spacecraft," according to physicists Yuri Rezunkov and Alexander Schmidt, who published in the current issue(Opens in a new window) of The Optical Society's (OSA) journal Applied Optics.
"Currently, the maximum speed of a spacecraft is limited by the amount of solid or liquid fuel that it can carry. Achieving higher speeds means that more fuel must be burnedfuel that, inconveniently, has to be carried by the craft and hefted into space. These burdensome loads can be reduced, however, if a laserone located at a remote location, and not actually on the spacecraftwere used to provide additional propulsive force," the OSA wrote in a summary of the paper.
Rezunkov, of Russia's Institute of Optoelectronic Instrument Engineering in Russia, and Schmidt, affiliated with the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute in St. Petersburg, modified a laser-based propulsion process called laser ablation to assist conventional gas-blasting spacecraft engines in producing thrust.
Laser ablation uses a pulsed laser beam to "strike a surface, heat it up, and burn off material to create what is known as a plasma plumea column of charged particles that flow off the surface," the OSA explained. The outward-moving "exhaust" represented by the plasma plume provides thrust to the object struck by the laser, such as a spacecraft or airplane.
The two researchers devised a new technique where they are able to generate the laser-ablation plasma plume so that it flows "close to the interior walls" of a gas nozzle used in conventional engines. This serves the purpose of clearing choke points in gas nozzles caused by the instability of supersonic gases and shock waves created in the gas-ejection processthe upshot being that the nozzles become "significantly" more efficient thrust mechanisms, according to Rezunkov and Schmidt.
"Summarizing the data obtained, we can forecast the application of the supersonic laser propulsion techniques not only for launching small satellites to Earth orbits but also for additional acceleration of supersonic aircrafts to achieve Mach 10 and more," Rezunkov was quoted as saying by OSA.
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