would my sail get a hole poked in it????

[thablakester]

I've been seeing a lot of shows lately where they're talking about building a traveling device that would be powered by light bouncing off of sails. Here's my question... Let's say that we were abole to build a device that had a massive sail, let's say 1/2 mile wide sail, and it takes off for deep space (somewhere, maybe alpha centauri). What is stopping space junk that's traveling as fast as it travels through space (i don't know the speeds but i do know that it's fast!) from hitting the sail and busting a hole in it and tearing it to shreds? this question could also be posed about spaceships traveling far into outer space and the junk that's flying around having its way with a shuttle. what if one day we arrive at a point where people can travel to the asteroid belt? would we just go around it or try to steer through it?

thanks in advance for any clarification! I appreciate it!

 

[bushwhacker]

Your question about a solar sail is a good one. I doubt that you would get hit by anything big enough to rip it to shreads. we have sent many probes thru the asteroid belt already and havent had one hit yet. not to say it wont happen. but thers a lot of space out there

 

[robnissen]

You have hit on a huge problem with travel at relativistic speeds. Most of the stuff that zips around the solar system does so at speeds at an order of magnitude of 100Km/s. Small things don't do much damage at those speeds. But if your solar sail was eventually accelerated to .1c, its speed would be 30,000KM/s. Really small things can do massive damge at those speeds (which is what their speed would be relative to your sail). Thus, even if we had the ability to accelerate a space ship to .1c, it wouldn't do us any good because our ship would be destroyed fairly quickly by collisions with tiny particles. Since we are fresh out of Star Trek deflector shields, this problem must be solved before we can even consider relativistic space ships. One possible proposal is to have an ice shield many meters thick in front of the space ship, so that the particles collide with it rather than the ship. Then as the particles destroy the ice shield, just replenish it with more water. Of course, that would greatly increase the mass of the ship, which would then require even greater power to accelerate it, which makes relativistic speeds that much harder to achieve. These numerous problems may mean that it will be 3020 and not 2020 before we get anywhere close to relativistic speeds.

 

[MeteorWayne]

Actually, particles (asteroids or meteors etc) zip around at a maximum speed of ~ 41 km/sec at 1 AU (our orbit) if they are part of the solar system, which so far, everything we've detected has been. The speed is slower further out, and faster closer to the sun. The earth, in a close to circular orbit, does ~ 30 km/sec; the 41 km/sec applies to comets, asteroids, and meteoroids on highly eccentric orbits.

It doesn't affect your point about speeds like 0.1c, but just like to keep the baseline straight.