conservation of momentum and laser powered solar sail

haruspex

Quote by A.T.

The same is true for a pulse of light, which will be reflected with a Doppler red-shift at the end. But I'm not sure if you can break this down to a single photon being reflected.

You can. On an earlier thread I calculated the Doppler shift and found that the photon's lost energy matched the mirror's gain in kinetic energy.

nemesiswes

Yeah I figured that it would be more efficient to just fire the laser out the back then use mirrors or some absorbing material. But I just wanted to know if it was possible theoretically, not if it was useful or not and apparently it is possible, just not very useful, lol.

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nemesiswes	Yeah I figured that it would be more efficient to just fire the laser out the back then use mirrors or some absorbing material. But I just wanted to know if it was possible theoretically, not if it was useful or not and apparently it is possible, just not very useful, lol.