Hawking Backs $100 Million Interstellar Travel Project to Send 'Nano-Craft' To Nearest Star

At a press conference on Tuesday, Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, cosmologist Stephen Hawking and a group of scientists and philanthropists announced a $100 million research program to send robotic probes to nearby stars within a generation. The group believes that using a nano-spacecraft propelled by lasers, they will be able to reach Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years after launch. The nearest star system is 40 trillion km away, which using current technology would take about 30,000 years to reach there. The aforementioned group said that thanks to their research and development, they might be able to make a spacecraft that could cut down the duration to 30 years. Reuters reports: Tuesday's announcement, made with cosmologist Stephen Hawking, comes less than a year after the announcement of Breakthrough Listen. That decade-long, $100 million project, also backed by Milner, monitors radio signals for signs of intelligent life across the universe. Breakthrough Starshot involves deploying small light-propelled vehicles to carry equipment like cameras and communication equipment. Scientists hope the vehicles, known as nano-craft, will eventually fly at 20 percent of the speed of light, more than a thousand times faster than today's spacecraft. "The thing would look like the chip from your cell phone with this very thin gauzy light sail," said Pete Worden, the former director of NASA's Ames Research Center, who is leading the project. "It would be something like 10, 12 feet across."The Atlantic has just published an in-depth report on this, also explaining how this project came to being. You can also watch the live stream of the press conference.

Comments

Interesting, but..

[wbr1]

I love the idea. However with a device that small, how do we get a signal back? It will not be able to generate a strong radio or light signal to send back. Would we be able to use existing radio telescopes to pick it up, or would we need better receiving infrastructure?

Re:Interesting, but..

[NEDHead]

If you have a continuous stream of launches, it would be simple to create a mesh network (for redundancy) that daisy-chains the length of the path to relay signals.

And by having a large cluster of detector devices you can have an arbitrarily large collective system for high resolution.

Re:Interesting, but..

[NEDHead]

Sure is. Which is why it requires creative solutions. And if they travel at 0.2C, and you launch every second then you have separation of about 60KM. That represents about 150 million units per light year to the target, or 600M to AC, spread over 20 years at, say $20 each so $600M per target per year, or one Shuttle launch per year

Obligatory Fermi

[Applehu Akbar]

So why hasn't "someone" done this already?

Re:Obligatory Fermi

[Athanasius]

You can't collimate a laser beam that perfectly. When I looked into that some time recently I believe for a visible red light laser you'd see significant dispersion after less than 10km. Yes, in a vacuum. Even if you could align the internals perfectly you'd still get a small amount of diffraction where the beam leaves the apparatus.

Over lightyears you're never going to maintain beam cohesion.

This also both answers the GP's question for the period of time the such a probe is being accelerated and why it wouldn't be accelerated the whole distance. Indeed given the travel time, even if accelerated to very close to the speed of light, you'd not be aiming the laser at the destination system (it would move some by the time the probe got there).

Starwisp

[seanellis]

Something like this was proposed many years ago by Robert L Forward, called Starwisp. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for details.

The probe would be very light but extended, like a cobweb. Tiny processor/sensor nodes would exist where the wires touched. Some nodes and web filaments would undoubtedly be destroyed by dust collisions en route, but would be multiply redundant. On arrival, the probe would be tattered and torn but still functional.

Re:0.2C

[Eloking]

Um, small or not, have they considered how the craft is going to be shielded against collisions at that speed? Even something as small as a grain of sand at 0.2C packs quite a wallop. Also, is radiation an issue at that velocity?

Collisions at 0.2C? Hell, even at 100 MPH (160Km/h) the probe will be pretty much destroyed.

The magic is that most of the universe is, well, empty. I didn't do the math for this particular case, but I remember one of NASA scientist that made such calculation of the probability of a collision of the voyager probe for the next millennium. It was several digit after the decimal point.