Optimal mass and speed for interstellar flyby with directed-energy propulsion

Abstract

The design of mission scenarios for the flyby investigation of nearby star systems by probes launched using directed energy is addressed. Multiple probes are launched with a fixed launch infrastructure, and download of scientific data occurs following target encounter and data collection. Assuming the primary goal is to reliably recover a larger volume of collected scientific data with a smaller data latency (elapsed time from launch to complete recovery of the data), it is shown that there is an efficient frontier where volume cannot be increased for a given latency and latency cannot be reduced for a given volume. For each probe launch, increasing the volume along this frontier is achieved by increasing the probe mass, which results in a reduced probe speed. Thus choosing the highest feasible probe speed generally does not achieve an efficient tradeoff of volume and latency. Along this frontier the total distance traveled to the completion of data download does not vary significantly, implying that the download time duration is approximately a fixed fraction of the launch-to-target transit time. Due to longer propulsion duration when probe mass is increased, increasing data volume incurs a cost in the total launch energy expended, but with favorable economies of scale. An important characteristic of any probe technology is the scaling law that relates probe mass to transmit data rate, as this affects details of the efficient frontier.