Comment Re:Yes, Here's Why (Score 1) 1747
Theories remain theories, period.
Yeah, the person misusing the word above falls into the Princess Bride category -- "I don't think that word means what you think it means."
Proton Beams Sent Around the LHC 115
feldhaus writes "The BBC reports that the first beams for over one year have been successfully sent around the complete circumference of the Large Hadron Collider. Engineers do not yet have a stable circulating beam but they hope to by 0600 GMT on Saturday."
Comment Re:How are you making your course corrections? (Score 2, Informative) 185
On a "good" sail the surface is very reflective. The force that propels the spacecraft is the sum of two vectors; one pointing from the sun to the spacecraft, and a second for the reflected radiation leaving the sail. So you can steer the spacecraft by shortening one side and lengthening the other side of the says attaching the sail to the spacecraft, redirecting the outgoing vector. Or do something similar (e.g. reorient segments rather than the whole sail).
Comment Much ado about nothing (Score 2, Informative) 185
It's more likely that the flight engineers would just add course corrections in (i.e. change the sail orientation to redirect the force) if they had a specific target in the Oort cloud in mind.
Just as small errors due to GR get magnified over the long trajectory, so do small corrections get magnified if made early enough. And, as one earlier commenter noted, a million km isn't much of anything at these distances.
