Journal
ACS PHOTONICS
Volume 9, Issue 1, Pages 190-196Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.1c01352
Keywords
Starshot lightsail; inverse design; topology optimization; machine learning
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Funding
- Breakthrough Initiatives, a division of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation
- Purdue's Elmore ECE Emerging Frontiers Center Crossroads of Quantum and AI
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The Starshot lightsail project aims to build an ultralight spacecraft that can reach Proxima Centauri b in 20 years with propulsion from a high-power laser array. The project imposes extreme requirements on the lightsail's optical, mechanical, and thermal properties. The framework developed can optimize the lightsail's optical and opto-kinematic properties, opening up pathways to a multi-objective optimization of the entire lightsail propulsion system.
The Starshot lightsail project aims to build an ultralight spacecraft (nanocraft) that can reach Proxima Centauri b in approximately 20 years, requiring propulsion with a relativistic velocity of similar to 60 000 km/s. The spacecraft's acceleration approach currently under investigation is based on applying the radiation pressure from a high-power laser array located on Earth to the spacecraft lightsail. However, the practical realization of such a spacecraft imposes extreme requirements on the lightsail's optical, mechanical, thermal properties. Within this work, we apply adjoint topology optimization and a variational autoencoder-assisted inverse design algorithm to develop and optimize a silicon-based lightsail design. We demonstrate that the developed framework can provide optimized optical and opto-kinematic properties of the lightsail. Furthermore, the framework opens up the pathways to realizing a multi-objective optimization of the entire lightsail propulsion system, leveraging the previously demonstrated concept of physics-driven compressed space engineering.
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