The faster, laser powered spacecraft would dramatically reduce astronauts' exposure to radiation during the journey.
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Enter Emmanuel Duplay and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. This team has come up with a way to propel a one-ton spacecraft to Mars in just 45 days, accelerated by a giant laser on Earth. And they say the same technology could slash the transit time for other missions, for example, to Venus, the ice giants and even to the Sun’s gravitational focus beyond the Kuiper belt.
One way to do this is by converting the laser light into electric power and using that to accelerate ions. But the process that Duplay and colleagues examine is to use the laser light to heat a propellant, such as hydrogen, and allow it to expand through a nozzle to generate thrust. Duplay and co’s plan is to generate continuous thrust for several hours to give the spacecraft the velocity of around 14 km/s necessary to reach Mars in just 45 days. After this initial acceleration, the propulsion unit separates from the spacecraft and returns to Earth where it can be re-used.
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