The Breakthrough Starshot project aims to explore a nearby star system using ultra-powerful laser beams and very small spaceships.
The late Stephen Hawking, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb and Russian-American billionaire Yuri Milner are at the origin of this project. The concept is based on over 80 scientific studies of interstellar travel.
“We were given a goal: to study a number of different methods of how to send an object to another star. In the end, we decided that the only reliable way to do this was to build a huge laser, probably in Chile,”says one of the project staff members Peter Klupar.
As part of it, scientists expect to send about 1,000 tiny StarChips in the direction of Alpha Centauri - the closest star system to Earth after the Sun. The speed of these probes will be 20 percent of the speed of light (about 215 million kilometers per hour), and each "chip" will weigh just under one gram.
Another destination is Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth after the Sun that may have a habitable planet. The dispatch of StarChips is planned in the mid-2030s, and the ships will be able to accelerate to their super speed in a few minutes, thanks to a powerful laser explosion emitted into space from the Earth's surface.
However, astronomers also warn about the dangers of such an enterprise: a laser beam with a power of 100 gigawatts (namely, this power is required to successfully send the chips) will be so strong that it can burn any city in a matter of minutes if it is reflected from an object in space and returns to the ground. Another obstacle can be clouds of gas and dust that hide between the stars - such material can simply destroy a fast-moving spacecraft.
Illustration of sending nanoships using a powerful laser beam.
At the same time, if all goes well, Starchips cameras will be able to provide humanity with the first large-scale photographs of worlds the size of Earth by the 2060s: the journey itself will take about 25 years, and it will take more than four years to obtain the data, depending on the destination. …
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As an example, astronomers refer to the successful launch of experimental four-gram satellites called "sprites" built and tested by staff at Cornell University. In June 2017, a fleet of six of these mini-ships went into space aboard an Indian rocket. They were equipped with a temperature sensor and transmitted data to Earth via a radio sound signal. According to Klupar, such tiny spaceships could be seen as the predecessors of StarChips.
But apart from the star systems of Centauri, Starshot has a closer target - the Solar System. In 2030, the project team hopes to build a one gigawatt laser base station in the Sierra Nevada mountains. This would test the concept of StarChip's laser-based interstellar missions, but everything could be 10 times cheaper. The idea is to propel probes past planets, moons, asteroids and other objects at one percent of the speed of light.
Scientists believe that with the help of their technology, they will be able to reach Mars in a few days, to Jupiter in a few weeks, and to Pluto in a few months. The latter result took NASA's New Horizons probe about nine years. The StarChip variant, designed for the solar system, will weigh about 100 grams - about 100 times more massive than the interstellar one. The launch of this project will require the participation of many countries and their approval, since the flash of a one-gigawatt laser could damage satellites passing through this section.
Scientists estimate the project at a billion dollars, with most of the investment going to a laser beam. However, once the station is built, simple and frequent deep-space exploration can become much cheaper.
Dmitry Mazalevsky