What it would take to park a solar sail at Alpha Centauri

[Robert]

Breakthrough Starshot is an initiative that hopes to send miniature spaceships on a high-speed jaunt to the Centauri system sometime within the next few decades. Doing that requires the development of a variety of untried technology—and that's before we get to the issue of sending data back. Still, even if Breakthrough Starshot never gets any hardware beyond the Solar System, it's clearly getting people to think about what it would take to get a good look at our closest stellar neighbors.

In the latest example, a German researcher named René Heller has teamed with Michael Hippke, a self-proclaimed "gentleman scientist" with 10 peer-reviewed publications. Their goal: to see if we could not just get hardware to the Centauri system, but put it into orbit for long-term observations. The answer's yes, but the trip will not be short.

Breakthrough Starshot's design is a tiny micro-spacecraft attached to a solar sail. Solar sails don't actually need the Sun; they can accelerate by using light from any source. So, Breakthrough Starshot hopes to have an array of lasers give the sail and its spacecraft a boost up to 20 percent of the speed of light. That will get the spacecraft to Proxima Centauri, the closest star. Data will get back while most of the principals involved in the work are still alive.

But that speed also means that they won't have much time to find anything out about Proxima and its orbiting exoplanet. The spacecraft "would traverse a distance equivalent to the Moon’s orbit around the Earth in just about six seconds," the researchers note, "with little time left for high-quality close-up exploration and posing huge demands to the imaging system." So, Heller and Hippke decided to look into the possibility of slowing things back down. Their results appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

 

[redrumloa]

I remember reading about this a year or so ago. I guess the thing that has changed is looking to put one or more in orbit? That would be an amazing feat.