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| ESA/Hubble/NASA The star system α Centauri is more than 4 light years from the Sun. |
0.20 x 3.00 x 108 m/s = 6 x 107 m/s isn't warp drive, but it's still pretty fast. We'll also get to see some phenomena in the universe that would normally take us decades to visit, and within our lifetimes so long as our sturdy cell-sized craft and their respective sails aren't punctured with micro meteors or picked off by V'Ger. The benefit to us on Earth will be the spin off technology. As with the original space race, we won't be the only ones with small ships and tall sails out there.
Space has long fascinated humans, but few have dared to initiate an interstellar space programme. Now a coalition of entrepreneurs and scientists aims to design a fleet of laser-powered spacecraft that could reach α Centauri, the star system closest to the Solar System, in just two decades. The group envisions probes that could complete that journey — a distance of 4.37 light years (1.34 parsecs) — at 20% the speed of light.
“For the first time in human history we can actually do more than observe the stars,” said Yuri Milner, a Russian Internet billionaire who is funding the initiative, at a 12 April press conference in New York. “We can reach them.”
Called Breakthrough Starshot, the programme is based on an idea that has been around for decades: the solar sail. The theory is that a lightweight space sail could harness the momentum carried by photons in order to travel without fuel.
The Breakthrough Starshot team is betting that a burst of concentrated lasers, fired from the ground, could rapidly accelerate a mobile-phone-sized device equipped with microelectronics and a tiny sail — providing much more energy than could be harnessed from the Sun. Whereas NASA’s plutonium-powered New Horizons spacecraft took nine years to reach Pluto, the “nanocraft” envisioned by Breakthrough Starshot would pass by the dwarf planet and exit the Solar System in three days.
Nature: Billionaire backs plan to send pint-sized starships beyond the Solar System
Jeff Tollefson
Related link
Tech Insider: 'Starshot' wants to launch tiny robots to a star 25 trillion miles awayKevin Loria
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