@stan It is a great question. I feel like If we had one laser station here and one on Mars there could be a system of utilizing the lasers to both accelerate and also brake the spacecraft. Retro rockets I don't feel would work because the speed at which it would be going it would be hard to brake. Going to other star systems is an entirely different problem because if it is just a little Nano probe how would you have any mechanism to counter act the speed. And let's say it was flying that fast could it take a clear picture or would it just be blurry? I'm surprised New Horizons was able to take clear pictures of Pluto considering it was going so fast and the light is so dim out there. You would have thought it would have needed to be a long exposure and that thing was moving pretty fast and was just zipping by. But somehow they got really good images. But again New Horizons was going snails pace compared to this laser technology.
@stan It is a great question. I feel like If we had one laser station here and one on Mars there could be a system of utilizing the lasers to both accelerate and also brake the spacecraft. Retro rockets I don't feel would work because the speed at which it would be going it would be hard to brake. Going to other star systems is an entirely different problem because if it is just a little Nano probe how would you have any mechanism to counter act the speed. And let's say it was flying that fast could it take a clear picture or would it just be blurry? I'm surprised New Horizons was able to take clear pictures of Pluto considering it was going so fast and the light is so dim out there. You would have thought it would have needed to be a long exposure and that thing was moving pretty fast and was just zipping by. But somehow they got really good images. But again New Horizons was going snails pace compared to this laser technology.