this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Well that's a really interesting application though... 9 times less thrust may not actually be a very big deal. A solar sail probe would likely be a lot lighter than a fueled equivalent, so that means you have the payload mass to send more probes on the same launch. And asteroids don't have meaningful amounts of gravity, so you can take as long as you want to get from one to another (you don't need much thrust to overcome their gravity well). So yeah, I think more than likely you could make up for a lack of speed with sheer quantity.