The star system is located 4.37 light years or about 25 trillion miles from Earth.
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The impressive board members of Breakthrough Starshot now includes Stephen Hawking, Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner.
“Today, we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos because we are human, and our nature is to fly”.
Still, it’s exciting. And as Hawking warns in a press statement: “Earth is a lovely place, but it might not last forever”. Sooner or later, we must look to the stars.
Milner said that he had pledged $100 million (88 million euros) to the project, which called Breakthrough Starshot. “But now we can transcend it. With light beams, light sails and the lightest spacecraft ever built, we can launch a mission to Alpha Centauri within a generation”, Hawking explained. Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that the company will send tiny space probes to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, to investigate possible alien life in space.
The Nanocraft are gram-scale robotic spacecraft that have a StarChip inside and a Lightsail.
Breakthrough Starshot will be led by Pete Worden, the director of NASA’s AMES Research Center in Northern California from 2006 to 2015.
Even before we take the massive step of reaching an entirely different solar system this would enable us to zip about our own solar system as easily as popping to the shop (but with more lasers). Its size is comparable to a postage stamp; it weighs a gram. It will be packed with cameras, photon thrusters, power supply, and navigation and communication equipment. That means it would take around 20,000 years to send a craft like it to Alpha Centauri. However, Milner projects that each individual probe may only cost as much as today’s iPhone – researchers have bet on continued advances in nanotechnology and the consistency of Moore’s law to support the program’s finer details.
Prof. Hawking, the author of A Brief History of Time, is backing the project by Milner’s Breakthrough Foundation, a private organisation funding scientific research initiatives that government funders think to be too ambitious.
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The idea of the nanocrafts is awesome instead of using large spacecraft or people having to travel to space. After that, the project is expected to require at least 20 years of development and upwards of $10 billion in funding.
