At one time, humanity had ambitions that led to such incredible projects as the first manned flight into space or a mission to the moon. The next step will be the colonization of planets, and then interstellar travel. The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative is the successor to human ambition and promises to pave our way to the stars in the immediate vicinity.
The brainchild of Russian billionaire entrepreneur Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Starshot made its mark in April 2016 at a press conference attended by renowned physicists including Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson. While the project is far from complete, the preliminary plan involves sending thousands of postage stamp-sized chips on large silver sails, which will first enter Earth's orbit and then be accelerated by ground-based lasers.
In two minutes of laser acceleration, the spacecraft will accelerate to one-fifth the speed of light - a thousand times faster than any artificial vehicle in the entire history of mankind.
Each spacecraft will fly for 20 years and collect scientific data about interstellar space. Upon reaching the planets in the Alpha Centauri star system, the built-in digital camera will take high-resolution photographs and send images to Earth, allowing us to look at our closest planetary neighbors. In addition to scientific knowledge, we can find out if these planets are suitable for human colonization.
The team behind Breakthrough Starshot is as impressive as the technology. The board of directors includes Milner, Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook. Pete Warden, former director of NASA's Ames Research Center, is CEO. Several prominent scientists, including Nobel laureates, are advising the project, and Milner put in $ 100 million of his own funds to get the work started. Together with colleagues, they are investing over $ 10 billion over several years to complete the work.
Although this whole idea seems completely sci-fi, there is no scientific obstacle to its implementation. This, however, does not have to happen tomorrow: for Starshot to be successful, a number of advances in technology are required. The organizers and scientific consultants believe in exponential progress and that Starshot has been around for 20 years.
Below you will find a list of eleven Starshot technologies and what hopes scientists are pinning on their exponential development over the next twenty years.
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Exoplanet detection
An exoplanet is a planet outside of our solar system. Although the first scientific discovery of an exoplanet took place only in 1988, as of May 1, 2017, 3,608 exoplanets were discovered in 2,702 planetary systems. While some of them resemble planets in the solar system, there are many unusual ones, such as those with rings 200 times wider than those of Saturn.
What is the reason for this flood of discoveries? Substantial improvement of telescopes.
Just 100 years ago, the largest telescope in the world was the Hooker Telescope with a 2.54 meter mirror. Today, the ESO's Very Large Telescope, made up of four large telescopes 8.2 meters in diameter, is the most productive ground-based astronomical installation, producing one scientific article per expert review per day.
Scientists are using MBT and a special tool to search for solid extrasolar planets in the star's potentially habitable zone. In May 2016, scientists using the TRAPPIST telescope in Chile found not one, but seven Earth-sized exoplanets at once in a potentially habitable zone.
Meanwhile, in space, NASA's Kepler spacecraft, specially designed for the task, has already identified more than 2,000 exoplanets. The James Webb Space Telescope, which will launch in October 2018, will provide an unprecedented insight into whether exoplanets can support life. “If these planets have an atmosphere, JWST will be the key to uncovering their secrets,” says Doug Hudgins, an exoplanet program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington DC.
Launch costs
The Starshot mother ship will be launched aboard the rocket and will launch 1,000 ships. The cost of transporting payloads using single-use rockets is enormous, but private service providers such as SpaceX and Blue Origin have demonstrated success in launching reusable rockets that are expected to significantly reduce launch costs. SpaceX has already cut costs to $ 60 million to launch the Falcon 9, and as the private space industry expands and reusable rockets become more prevalent, the price will fall and fall.
Starchip
Each 15mm Starchip ("star chip") must contain a large array of sophisticated electronic devices such as a navigation system, a camera, a communication laser, a radioisotope battery, a camera multiplexer and its interface. The engineers hope they can squeeze it all into a small postage stamp-sized machine.
After all, the first computer chips in the 1960s contained a handful of transistors. Thanks to Moore's Law, today we can fit billions of transistors on each chip. The first digital camera weighed several kilograms and captured 0.01-megapixel images. Today, a digital camera sensor captures high-quality color images at 12 megapixels and fits into a smartphone - along with other sensors such as GPS, accelerometer and gyroscope. And we are seeing these improvements trickle down into space exploration with smaller satellites providing us with quality data.
For Starshot to be successful, we'll need a chip mass of about 0.22 grams by 2030. But if improvements continue to come at the same pace, forecasts suggest that this is quite possible.
Light sail
The sail should be made of a material that will be highly reflective (in order to gain the maximum pulse from the laser), minimally absorbing (so as not to be burned by heat) and at the same time very light (allowed for quick acceleration). These three criteria are extremely important, and currently there is no suitable material for them.
The necessary advances can come from automating artificial intelligence and accelerating the discovery of new materials. This automation has gone so far that machine learning methods today can "generate libraries of candidates for suitable materials in tens of thousands of positions" and allow engineers to determine which ones are worth fighting for and which are worth testing under certain conditions.
Energy storage
Although Starchip will use a tiny radioisotope battery for its 24-year journey, we will still need conventional chemical batteries for the lasers. Lasers will need to release colossal energy in a short time, which means the energy will have to be stored in batteries nearby.
Batteries are improving by about 5-8% per year, although we often don't see this because energy consumption is increasing. If batteries continue to improve at this rate, in twenty years they will be 3-5 times more capacity than they are today. Other innovations could follow a major investment in the battery industry. The Tesla-Solar City joint venture has already delivered 55,000 to Kauai to power most of its infrastructure.
Lasers
Thousands of powerful lasers will be used to propel the craft along with the sail.
Lasers obeyed Moore's Law in much the same way as integrated circuits, doubling their power every 18 months. The last decade has seen a dramatic acceleration in the scaling of the power of diode and fiber lasers. The first pierced 10 kilowatts of single-mode fiber in 2010 and a 100 kilowatt barrier a few months later. In addition to raw power, we also need success in combining phased array lasers.
Speed
Our ability to move quickly … moved quickly. In 1804, the train was invented and very soon gained an unheard of speed of 100 kilometers per hour. The spacecraft "Helios-2" eclipsed this record in 1976: at the fastest moment "Helios-2" was moving away from the Earth at a speed of 356,040 km / h. 40 years later, the New Horizons spacecraft has reached a heliocentric speed of 45 kilometers per second (more than 200,000 kilometers per hour). But even at that speed, it would take a long time to reach Alpha Centauri, four light years away.
Although accelerating subatomic particles to near-light speed has become commonplace in particle accelerators, macroscopic objects have not been able to accelerate that way. Reaching 20% the speed of light would be 1000 times the speed of any human-built object.
Memory storage
The ability to store information became the basis for calculations. Starshot will depend on continued declines in the cost and size of digital memory to provide sufficient storage space for its programs and images captured in the Alpha Centauri star system and its planets.
The cost of memory has declined exponentially for decades: in 1970, a megabyte was worth about a million dollars; now - mere pennies. The size required for storage has also shrunk, from a 5-megabyte hard drive loaded in 1956 with a forklift to 512-gigabyte USB sticks weighing a few grams.
Telecommunications
Once Starchip captures the images, they will need to be sent back to Earth for processing.
Telecommunications have progressed significantly since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. The average internet speed today is about 11 megabits per second. The bandwidth and speed required to send digital images over 4 light years - 40 trillion kilometers - will require the latest advances in telecommunications.
Li-Fi technology is extremely promising, and its wireless transmission promises to be 100 times faster than Wi-Fi. There are also experiments in the field of quantum telecommunications, which will not be fast, but safe.
Calculations
The final step of the Starchip project will be to analyze the data returned by the spacecraft. To do this, we will have to rely on the exponential development of computing power, which has increased by a trillion times over the past 60 years.
Recently, the decline in the cost of computing has been strongly associated with clouds. Looking ahead and using new computing methods like quantum, we can expect a 1,000-fold increase in power by the time Starshot returns data. This exceptional computing power will enable us to perform sophisticated scientific simulations and analyzes of our nearest neighboring star system.
ILYA KHEL