by Kelvin F Long
Last year I published a paper on dust erosion for the Project Starshot probe. This is in relation to my work on the Breakthrough Initiatives Project Starshot, where I sat on the advisory committee since it was first formed in 2016. It was a lot of fun and I got to work with people like Martin Rees, Louis Friedman, Phil Lubin, Geoff Landis, Greg Matloff, Avi Loeb, Jim Benford, Greg Benford, Pete Klupar, Mason Peck, Kevin Parkin, Pete Worden, to name a few...and even got to meet Frank Drake a couple of times before his passing. It was an honour to have worked on the project and I feel that the theoretical results from the study have advanced our knowledge about how to do beamed propulsion missions of this type. Project Starshot still continues of course and I hope will pioneer new and interesting results in the future. In my paper I estimate that the erosion rates over the ~20 year journey would be of order 10^-11 - 10^-8 g/s and including a design margin would suggest a shielding size of order ~3 - 7 mm thick for the Gram scale probe. Interesting to wake up this morning to the news that the New Horizons probe may have discovered an additional dust layer to the outer solar system. The paper was:
K. F. Long, Calculations of Particle Bombardment Due to Dust and Charged Particles in the ISM on the Project Starshot Gram-Scale Interstellar Probe, JBIS, 76, 94-111, 2023.
Below is a photo of the original Project Starshot advisory committee meeting at the house of our sponsor Yuri Milner back in 2016. I'm at the back next to Greg Benford. Below is also a photo from the meeting and it illustrates what it is like to work on such projects with many amazing people all dedicated to the vision of advancing spaceflight on behalf of humanity.
Typical Project Starshot Meeting discussing the technical program
Inaugural Meeting of Advisory Committee at the home of the sponsor Yuri Milner