I think the idea is very interesting, but please correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t the payload experiencing a sustained acceleration of hundreds of thousands of Gs, if not millions?
I am not sure that anything useful could survive that kind of sustained crushing acceleration. By comparison a rifle bullet being shot is around 100k Gs for millisecond , this would go on for weeks or months.
The white paper says the payload release doesn't have to be precisely timed, if TARS is on a circular orbit, and I do not understand why. Sure, the plane in which the payload shoots off, is defined by the orbital position of TARS. But there are 360 degrees of freedom within that plane. If we aim at e.g. a specific star, how is release timing not a critical factor? And if it is, what timer would survive the solar radiation and extreme spinning, remaining reliably operational and microsecond accurate?
David Kipping of Cool Worlds Lab just uploaded a video about TARS:
This is amazing. How have i never seen this channel before?
He’s an incredible scientist and educator. His back catalog of videos is well worth watching.
He wrote the paper too :) Anyhow, I wonder if you can make a useful probe in the payload of a few grams? Maybe a swarm of them could act in concert to do useful things?