The game changer for space exploration in coming decades will be self-assembly, enabling the growth of a new and invigorating paradigm in which multiple smallsat sailcraft launched as ‘rideshare’ payloads augment huge ‘flagship’ missions. Self-assembly allows formation-flying smallsats to emerge enroute as larger, fully capable craft carrying complex payloads to target. The case for this grows out of Slava Turyshev and team’s work at JPL as they refine the conceptual design for a mission to the solar gravitational lens at 550 AU and beyond. The advantages are patent, including lower cost, fast transit times and full capability at destination. Aspects of this paradigm are beginning to be explored in the literature, as I’ve been reminded by Alex Tolley, who forwarded an interesting paper out of the University of Padua (Italy). Drawing on an international team, lead author Giovanni Santi explores the use of CubeSat-scale spacecraft driven by sail technologies, in this case ‘lightsails’...

‘LightCraft’ is the term used by Slava Turyshev’s team at JPL and elsewhere to identify the current design of the ambitious mission we looked at briefly in the previous post. This is a Technology Demonstrator Mission (TDM), which can be considered a precursor to what may become a mission to the solar gravitational lens. The mission concept is under active investigation, partly via a Phase III grant from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts office. Reaching the focal region (for practical purposes, beyond 600 AU) in less than 25 years requires changes to our thinking in propulsion, not to mention payload size and the potential of robotic self-assembly en-route. Hence the paper the researchers have just released, “Science opportunities with solar sailing smallsats,” which makes the case for leveraging our growing expertise in solar sail design and the highly successful move toward miniaturization in space systems, which the authors believe can be extended to include smallsats operating...

We need to get to the ice giants. We have limited enough experience with our system’s larger gas giants, although orbital operations at both Jupiter and Saturn have been highly successful. But about the ice giants, their formation, their interiors, their moons (and even the possibility of internal oceans on these objects), we draw on only a single mission, Voyager II. Which is why the April 2022 decadal study (“Origins, Worlds, and Life: A Decadal Strategy for Planetary Science and Astrobiology 2023-2032”) recommended a Uranus mission, complete with orbiter, to be launched in the late 2030s. Can we do this under our existing paradigm for space exploration? A new paper titled “Science opportunities with solar sailing smallsats,” written by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Slava Turyshev and co-authored by major proponents of solar sail technologies, makes the case for coupling our abundant advances in miniaturization with our growing experience in solar sails to achieve missions at...