An entrepreneur has proposed sending a probe to Alpha Centai 4 light years away. His idea...

An entrepreneur has proposed sending a probe to Alpha Centai 4 light years away. His idea is to use a "solar sail", which is a large area reflective sheet, and propelling the spacecraft to 10% of the speed of light using a high powered laser. If the laser sends 1200 nm light at the sail and the power reaching the reflective sheet is 1500 W:

(a) What is the force due to light pressure on the reflective sheet, assuming the light backscatters with 20% efficiency?
(b) If an engineer is testing the spacecraft far away from the solar system so that the gravity of the sun and planets can be ignored, and the spacecraft is 65 kg, what would be the power necessary to achieve 10% of the speed of light if the acceleration part of the journey was only 5.0 x 10^5 km? (ignore relativistic effects)

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genius_generous answered 1 year ago

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