o travel beyond our solar system to destinations like Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighboring star system, it would take many human lifetimes with current technology. But what if this could be accomplished in just a fraction of a human lifetime instead? That’s the dream behind the Breakthrough Initiatives’ Starshot project. It began in 2016 and aims to design small, lightweight spacecraft powered by light that can reach Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years.
If this type of machine comes to fruition, it will vastly outpace today’s fastest spacecraft, like the Helios probes that NASA and West Germany collaborated on in the 1970s. Those older probes would take nearly 20,000 years to travel 4.4 light years (roughly 25 trillion miles) to Alpha Centauri, scientists estimate. But a new featherweight probe would give scientists unprecedented access to the farthest reaches of space, allowing them to capture close-up images of stellar objects like exoplanets for the first time in history, says Harry Atwater, Ph.D., a professor of applied physics and materials science at the California Institute of Technology. Formerly, Atwater was the lightsail research director for Breakthrough Starshot; he is continuing this work independently at Caltech.
Still woefully impractical for human interstellar travel.
To read more, click here.