Aiming for Proxima Centauri b: Gravitational effects on relativistic spacecraft trajectories
Abstract
How important are gravitational and relativistic effects for interstellar travel? We consider this question in the context of proposed laser-propelled spacecraft missions to neighboring stellar destinations. Our analysis applies to any spacecraft traveling at relativistic speeds. As a concrete example, we focus on a mission to Proxima Centauri b -- a terrestrial-sized planet in the habitable zone around our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri. We employ a Julia reimplementation of the PoMiN code, an N-body code modeling relativistic gravitational dynamics in the first post-Minkowskian (PM) approximation to general relativity (valid to linear order in Newton's constant $G$). We compute the gravitational influence of seven different celestial bodies and find that the Sun has the greatest influence on the trajectory of the interstellar spacecraft. We also study the differences between Newtonian and PM gravity, and find that if mission planners wish to hit Proxima Centauri b with an accuracy of better than about 690,000 kilometers, relativistic effects must be taken into account. To solve for the precise initial data needed to hit an intended target, we develop numerical fine-tuning methods and demonstrate that these methods can (within a given model) be precise to about a femtometer over a travel distance of $\sim4.25$ light years. However, we find that for the spacecraft trajectories we consider, higher order general relativistic effects (beyond the first PM approximation) from the Sun can displace the final position of the spacecraft by tens of kilometers. We also consider the variation in the initial direction of the spacecraft velocity and find that, even with relativistic effects properly taken into account, the miss distances can be dominated by the variation in the initial velocity that could arise from errors during the launch and boost phase of the spacecraft mission.