https://www.planetary.org/sci-tech/lightsail If material comprising the solar sails main sail is cut down into propeller shaped sections that are then rotated on a central shaft where additional layers at the front and back of the Cube Sat that make up the total area of a the main sail when deployed are used, would more thrust be generated? Would timing a single sail propeller to pass between two sail propellers and then the third layer to pass a single sail propeller between two second layer sail propellers, generate more thrust compared to all five propellers being a single sheet?
What type of Heligyros are you referring to? If the propellers are placed on Micro Compliant Machine parts and the blades are angled, would the propeller be able to generate solar power as it rotated due to solar interaction while the interaction between light and solar sail propeller moved the Cube Sat forward?
What you're proposing is the analogue of a windmill or waterwheel. Using a propeller-like configuration would make the whole assembly spin at the expense of forward propulsion. This would be the case whether solar photons or the solar wind are being reflected. Propellers in air or water work by being actively rotated by a motor so the medium - air or water - is driven backwards and the craft is thrust forward. The solar wind speed and density (at 1 AU assuming one is outside the beyond the Earth's magnetosphere) are about 440 km/s and 5x10^6 protons/m^3. The ram pressure due to the solar wind is about 3 nPa (nN/m^2). The pressure due to photons at 1 AU is a maximum of 9 μPa (assuming perfect reflectivity), three thousand times as much. The solar wind speed stays roughly constant up to the termination shock while the density falls off as approximately distance from the Sun squared. Beyond the termination shock up to the heliopause, the wind speed effectively drops to near zero. Solar photon flux also falls with distance squared so the available thrust for both also falls with distance squared and they remain in the same ratio up to the termination shock. Once you are beyond the termination shock at about 100 AU and the heliopause at just over 120 AU in the bow region, there'd be pressure from the interstellar medium wind with a pressure roughly the same as that of the solar wind just before the termination shock but whose direction is uncertain. Photon pressure still trumps though even if it has dropped to less than 1/14,400th the value at 1 AU. Ram pressure due to the solar wind is m.n.v^2 where m is the mass of a proton, n is the number density, and v is the solar wind speed. Most of the momentum in the solar wind is carried by protons. Light pressure, assuming perfect reflection, is 2.I/c, where I is the irradiance (in W/m^2, typically 1.361 kW/m^2 at 1 AU) and c is the speed of light (3x10^8 m/s). In practice, the reflecting surface will absorb some photons so the actual pressure is effectively lower. You might as well go with the flow rather than thrash about ineffectually wasting energy trying to boost a minor component of the available thrust. It's ridiculous to attempt to drive photons backward with a propeller. The increase in frequency due to blue shift is negligible given that the velocity of the propeller will be a minute fraction of light speed. The best you can do is to make sure you reflect the photons as efficiently as possible. The available thrust increases with the area of the sail but then so does its mass as well. The acceleration scales as roughly 1/(1+r), where r is the ratio of the payload mass to the sail mass. If r is 0.01 and you double the sail area so r is 0.005, the acceleration increases by 0.5% not 100%.
I'm not surprised there is an appropriate Futurama meme. However, I don't think we'll have starships than can run on Nibblonian poop as fuel anytime soon.
What you're proposing is the analogue of a windmill or waterwheel. Using a propeller-like configuration would make the whole assembly spin at the expense of forward propulsion. This would be the case whether solar photons or the solar wind are being reflected. Propellers in air or water work by being actively rotated by a motor so the medium - air or water - is driven backwards and the craft is thrust forward. Could radiation pressure be reflected off of the forward sail onto a smaller sail that would then reflect the radiation pressure back onto the larger sail to generate constant forward motion and velocity the further Cube Sat travelled away from the Sun?
Sounds a bit like the EM and similar drives. How are they doing? I doubt the efficacy of devices that appear to break any of the fundamental symmetries of space-time (aka conservation laws) but I'd like to be surprised. Maybe there is a way to exploit and amplify niche theoretical effects in physics to ratchet one's way against the vacuum by expending energy but not needing to throw part of one's mass away as fast as possible in the opposite direction. However, I expect such engines would need to be very subtle in their design.
Now, there are staged sail concepts. I think Forward had one of concentric disks. The outer disk reflects back on an inner disk to slow it down at its destination. That also separates, and a beam from Earth bounces off that ring and accelerates the inner most disk back to Earth...and the laser slows it down directly.
That's fine as long as you're conserving momentum and energy. I don't doubt that there might be ways to break those symmetries (in space and time respectively) but the currently known effects that suggest this is possible are either tiny or not exploitable.
That’s why I hope “Planet 9” (itself probably unreal) is a small black hole. We might learn a lot from that
As long as no-one tries to weaponise it. It could be a valuable power source if it is spinning. Finding a primordial black hole so close to the Earth would suggest there are many more in the universe. Unless its existence was essential for sapient life to evolve here - I see no reason why this would be so - it's very unlikely that it's unique. However, we don't have much evidence yet - it's just an interesting hypothesis.
If there are a lot of them...it explains missing mass and Fermi both. A good means of propulsion might just be to have an uber long tether fed to it with payload at other end