Astronomer David Kipping from Columbia University (USA) calculated the parameters of the solar sail, with which you can go to Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun. The corresponding preprint is available in the "Lenta.ru" edition.
The ship can reach a maximum speed of 60 thousand kilometers per second, provided that it is irradiated with a laser for about four hours, during which the ship will travel 5.8 astronomical units.
To do this, a solar sail must reflect more than 99.99 percent of the incident radiation and heat up to 300 degrees Celsius. In total, the laser will have to transfer more than ten terajoules of energy to the StarChip.
As an example of a device that can be sent to Proxima Centauri, Kipping looked at the StarChip from the Breakthrough Starshot project. The mass of such a spacecraft is one gram, the area of the solar sails is 16 square meters.
In April 2016, Russian businessman Yuri Milner and British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking announced the start of work on creating and sending a satellite to Alpha Centauri. NASA has a similar project called DE-STAR (Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and ExploRation).