The Starshot lightsail project aims to build an ultralight spacecraft (nanocraft) that can reach Proxima Centauri b in approximately 20 years, requiring propulsion with a relativistic velocity of ~60 000 km/s. The spacecrafts acceleration approach currently under investigation is based on applying the radiation pressure from a high-power laser array located on Earth to the spacecraft lightsail. However, the practical realization of such a spacecraft imposes extreme requirements to the lightsails optical, mechanical, thermal properties. Within this work, we apply adjoint topology optimization and variational autoencoder-assisted inverse design algorithm to develop and optimize a silicon-based lightsail design. We demonstrate that the developed framework can provide optimized optical and opto-kinematic properties of the lightsail. Furthermore, the framework opens up the pathways to realizing a multi-objective optimization of the entire lightsail propulsion system, leveraging the previously demonstrated concept of physics-driven compressed space engineering
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