Pellet-beam propulsion

In news– The concept, known as ‘pellet-beam’ propulsion, was awarded an early-stage US$175,000 NASA grant for further development recently.

About the pellet-beam’ propulsion system-

This system could theoretically beam a heavy spacecraft to outside the confines of our Solar System in less than 5 years – a feat that took the historic Voyager 1 probe 35 years to achieve.
The concept currently doesn’t exist much beyond calculations on paper.
The pellet-beam concept was partly inspired by the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, which is working on a ‘light-sail’ propulsion system.
With the help of millions of lasers, a tiny probe would theoretically be able to sail to neighboring Proxima Centauri in just 20 years.
The new proposal starts with a similar idea, throw fuel at a rocket instead of blast it out of one but it looks at how to shift larger objects.
To work, the conceptual propulsion system requires two spacecraft – one that sets off for interstellar space, and one that goes into orbit around Earth.
The spacecraft orbiting Earth would shoot a beam of tiny microscopic particles at the interstellar spacecraft.
Those particles would be heated up by lasers, causing part of them to melt into plasma that accelerates the pellets further, a process known as laser ablation.

Those pellets could reach 120 km/second (75 miles/second) and either hit the sail of the interstellar spacecraft or repel a magnet within it, helping to propel the spacecraft to huge speeds that would let it whizz out of our heliosphere – the bubble of solar wind around our Solar System.
With the pellet-beam, outer planets can be reached in less than a year, 100 AU [astronomical unit] in about 3 year and solar gravity lens at 500 AU in about 15 years.
For context, an AU, which stands for ‘astronomical unit’, roughly represents the distance between Earth and the Sun, or around 150 million km (93 million miles).
It took the Voyager 1 probe 35 years of travel to cross into interstellar space back in 2012, at roughly 122 AU away.
According to the current projections, a pellet-beamed spacecraft weighing 1 ton could do the same in under 5 years.