Starshot Project: thousands of ships to seek life – Diario Hoy (Argentina)

A Russian tycoon proposes to deploy a battalion of mini-rockets traveling at 20% the speed of light to send images from a neighboring system

T he purpose: determine whether Alpha Centauri, a star system about 40 trillion kilometers away, contains an Earth-like life capable of sustaining planet. To check this, the Breakthrough Starshot project has an initial budget of 100 million dollars.

This is a company that could take several years to take shape, and there is no guarantee it will work, but the money to start is now. The idea is to send a battalion of nano-ships traveling to nearly a quarter of the speed of light.

The announcement was made yesterday in New York and backed Cosmologist Stephen Hawking.

Breakthrough Starshot involves the deployment of small light powered vehicles to carry equipment such as cameras and communication equipment. Scientists hope these vehicles, known as nanocraft, can eventually get to fly 20% of the speed of light, more than a thousand times faster than the spacecraft today.

” the thing to chip your cell phone in the form of a very thin diaphanous light candle would seem, “said Pete Worden, former director of the Ames Research Center of NASA, who heads the project. “They would be something like 3 or 4 meters wide.”

A genuine container

sending a larger conventional spacecraft is proposed that contains thousands of nanocraft (mininaves) in orbit, and then launch the nanocraft one by one, said the head of the project in an interview.

the idea is unprecedented with mixed results. Two years ago, the KickSat Cornell University failed after the ship carrying 104 micro-satellites into space could not release them. The plan was to let small satellites remain on orbit and collected data for a few weeks.

Worden recognizes the challenges, including the launch nanocraft survival. Then they must endure 20 years of travel through the hostile environment of interstellar space with obstacles such as dust collisions. “Any of the problems still to be resolved is a reason to give up,” he said.

Governments would probably not consider this research because of its speculative nature, he said. However, technology is promising enough to be worthwhile. If the nanocraft reach the star system and succeeds in taking pictures, it would take about four years to transmit to Earth.