When it comes to interstellar space travel, getting to the destination quickly is only part of the challenge. How do you make sure you don’t overshoot your target?
This is a question for Breakthrough Starshot, the US$100 million interstellar travel project started by billionaire Yuri Milner and famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in 2015. And now, a pair of physicists in Germany claim to have nutted out an answer.
To check out the planets orbiting the star system closest to the sun, Alpha Centauri, Breakthrough Starshot aims to develop tiny space probes weighing only a gram but equipped with large, thin solar sails.
Photons from a powerful laser hitting the sail each transfer momentum – only a minuscule amount, but as each nanocraft will be in the near vacuum of space, it will encounter almost no resistance. A nanocraft could, in theory, could be accelerated to 20% the speed of light – or 60,000 kilometres per second – this way.
Although this proposed technology could allow a tiny probe to reach Alpha Centauri in just 20 years, the probe will shoot past the system within hours unless we can slow it down first.
Nice exercise in conceptualization, but generations long missions are simply impractical for any number of reasons. We need to step outside the box and devise a way to create a propellantless space drive that could accelerate a large mass at 1G close to the speed of light within a year, or, create a shortcut through space-time. And if we actually do have reverse engineered ET technology, then we need to release it to the world. To read more, click here.