Breakthrough Starshot is an initiative of a private foundation that aims to launch a tiny spacecraft, weighing just a few grams at a speed that would reach 20% of the speed of light, using a sail, the diagram is shown. The ship uses a light sail, a solar sail, the correct term, it would be better to say light sail because they work with light, what happens is that in space in the solar system what we have most of is sunlight.
The idea would be to use a terrestrial light projector to propel that ship, in reality they want to make several of them, make a kind of swarm of ultralight nano ships, probes with these light sails that reached 160 million kilometers per hour and that They could reach Next Centauri in about 20 years, the first problem is that they are extremely small, so we do not have the technology to put in them a transmitter, a camera and other other scientific devices to be able to collect information about what that they see on their trip.
That would be the first problem, everything has to be miniaturized, in a very tremendous way because taking into account that transmitting something simply emits a photo that that ship has taken of, for example, the planet in Proxima Centauri, you have to transmit it to Earth and to This will require a very large and powerful antenna,
We don't have the technology right now to make an efficient ship that can collect information and send it to us from the ground.
The other problem they have is that they have no brakes, they would pass by, there is no way to stop them that would be the second problem and the third problem is the one that Avil Loeb and his colleagues have discovered with the research titled “the interaction of spacecraft relativistic with the Interstellar environment”, and even if it was small the ship would brush against so much dust, gas and molecules that it would end up destroyed.
Three very big problems to overcome, being able to reduce the instruments, being able to overcome the resistance that it will encounter at that speed and not be destroyed and being able to maneuver, in this case not maneuver, in the best of cases and get it right with the planet, it will fly over them. He could send us some photos but then he would pass us by, he would continue his way through the stars because he has no way to brake, the ideal would be to create a larger ship with the capacity to also be able to brake, which is complicated taking into account that the same energy or more or less the same energy What you have used to accelerate you are going to have to use it to brake and be able to stay in orbit of that Planet, it is something complicated.
I wish we could reach the next centauri and analyze the planets, I am convinced that there are more planets than the one that has been discovered.
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