(28-07-2024, 07:26 PM)Tee tiong huat Wrote: Eubanks together with NASA isn't the only one pursuing this kind of research. Breakthrough Initiatives started its Starshot project in 2016 to combine nanometer-sized spacecraft with light sails, and in 2017, NASA began funding its own project targeted at launching a mission to Alpha Centauri by 2069, 100 years after Apollo 11.
While small spacecraft are easier to accelerate than larger probes, traditional fuel sources alone are not powerful or plentiful enough to push these craft to near light speed. Instead, Philip Lubin, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara whose ideas for interstellar travel inspired the Starshot team, told Live Science that these craft will likely rely on light instead.
A similarly, momentum carried by light is transferred to the spacecraft, which causes it to recoil and accelerate." The system is basically a gigantic flashlight — it's a giant laser array [on Earth]," Lubin said. If the spacecraft are sailboats, then the laser light is the wind in their sails.
Technology to create and test these craft, such as communications equipment small enough to fit on them, is still being developed. But there's no physical reason to believe that such a spacecraft couldn't conduct a flyby mission of Alpha Centauri, Lubin said.
Such mission behave much like Voyager 1 & 2 probes transmit high-resolution images of the star system back to Earth, some of which might contain our first lookProxima Centauri's potentially habitable planet.
While Lubin stressed that a journey to Alpha Centauri would be a long-term endeavor, Eubanks said he's confident that big advances could come this century.
"I think, we'll reach Alpha Centauri system, with small probes launching in the decade of the 2040s, and thus arriving in the 2060s," Eubanks said. "Significantly larger probes should be possible by end century, but without unexpected breakthroughs in propulsion physics, I think crewed missions will be a task for the next century."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ever-reach-al...41116.html
"'I'm thinking, if only >>we'll can reach Alpha Centauri system, with small probes...Lehh. Launching in the decade of the 2040s, and thus maybe...arriving in the 2060s."...a good try.