You Remember the Plan to Send Tiny Probes to Alpha Centauri?

I know we had a thread on it, but I can't find it, so I'm doing a new one. Anyway, a crazy Russian billionaire wants to send a flotilla of postage stamp sized probes to Alpha Centauri.

This weekend, I was at a conference where I got to see


Lawrence Motherfucking Krauss give a talk. It turns out that not only is Stephen Hawking involved in the project, but so is Lawrence Motherfucking Krauss! Krauss said that in about 10 years, or less, they will be testing the prototypes of the probes. Pretty cool, right? Be prepared to have your mind blown, however. According to Krauss, they're going to be testing the prototypes by sending them to places in our solar system like Europa and Enceladus, to have them look for life on those worlds. That is not the mind blowing part. It will take the probes two motherfucking days to get from Earth to their destinations, and they plan on sending an armada of probes every two days, for like a month, to those places.

Krauss said, but didn't go into any details, that the next 10 years of space exploration, at least in terms of probes, are going to be doing some amazing shit.

How do you get from Earth to Jupiter in two days? Even a photon drive wouldn't be that fast.

Solar sail. You accelerate something with almost no mass to about 20% the speed of light, and you can get around the solar system in a hurry. And they'll be using



to do it.

What's the reason for the size -- is it that it solves propulsion problems by basically allowing them to be pushed, instead of needing to have massive fuel reserves?

One of them. If they were the size of something like Voyager, they'd need massive solar sails and really high powered lasers to get them moving that fast. By shrinking them down, they can get them going wickedly fast, and thus cut the travel time down to something within a human lifetime. IIRC, it'll take 20 years for them to get to Alpha Centauri, and then another 4 years for the data to reach Earth.

If there is life below the surface of these moons these tiny probes stand a chance of contaminating it.

I'm sure they'll do their best to sterilize them, just as the Europeans and NASA are planning to do with their landers that they hope to send out in the coming decades.

Holy

Shit

The first prototypes are now in orbit!

Even if we had lasers capable of pushing them to 20% the speed of light, the signal strength (laser signal from alpha centauri?) of anything they could transmit back from a postage stamp sized device would be lost in the noise from whatever star they went to. It would have to have the electronics in something that won't get fried by the pushing laser or our sun. The shielding would render this unworkable.

For planetary exploration, the devices' size would limit the amount of data to less information than a good telescope (visual or radio spectrum) could snag from earth or earth orbit.

A postage-stamp size device that could be pushed by photons from an earth based laser would be overwhelmed by energy from our sun in short order. It would be a leaf in a gale.

The article says the russian is putting up $100 million and then states it would take 10 billion to build the laser array. A lot of people are going to be lapping up those millions, but I don't see investors lining up for the balance with no tangible return.

He's got Lawrence Motherfucking Krauss and Stephen Motherfucking Hawking working for him. If the preliminary tests are successful, I can see Elon Musk kicking some money his way. Paul Allen might as well, after all, Allen has a science fiction museum.

A particle beam sail would make more sense. I read several years ago that it could accelerate a spacecraft at more than 1,000 Gs for several weeks.

I see it going nowhere.

Here's a better article on the project from The Atlantic.

The concept requires technology that doesn't exist. The expectation is that each craft would have a sail of a few meters in diameter. The control module would be the size of an iPhone. The weight would have to be less than a few grams. Today's petite iPhone is 133 grams (without sail).

The driving lasers would be in an array of several square miles on some equatorial mountain top. They would need to correct for atmospheric variation to focus their beams. The cost is guestimated at $10-billion. Someone mentions that orbiting the laser (near mercury or elsewhere) would put the world in danger of being zapped by some evil mad scientist, so it must be earthbound.

Yuri Milner, the Russian benefactor has earmarked $100-million to develop a prototype. His education was as a particle physicist, but he never used this. He started business selling knock-off PCs on the grey market in Russia. He progressed to creating Russian equivalents of facebook, Amazon, etc and is worth around $2.5billion. Milner has created a competing prize fund for science and also spent $100 million to search for ET.

If the devices can be made at some future time, and money is found to build the driving lasers, after 25 years we might have pictures of extra-solar planets with enough definition to distinguish continents. From one star system in our back yard.

The seed money is enough to perform pure research and may result in some advances in material science. I'm sure Krauss and Hawking have worse things they could do.

These things are just space litter; they don't prove anything:

Perhaps.

The same could be said of the Apollo program in 1960, or the shuttle program in 1970, or Musk's rockets in 2000. Moore's Law is still valid, and 40 years ago, the "humble" iPhone would be a super computer.

So? Much of that technology already exists, as we have to correct for atmospheric variations to aim lasers at the Moon (which we do all the time, to check our distance, thanks to the retroreflectors Apollo missions 11, 14, and 15 placed there).

None of which has anything to do wtih the matter at hand. Should we ignore what Bill Gates has to say about malaria because he's a college dropout who peddled crappy software for much of his life?

Which is faster than we could get a telescope capable of doing the same thing.

The beauty of pure research is that you never know where it'll lead you.

Of course.

Perhaps. We shall see.

Yup, putting Hawking and Krauss on a problem with lots of pocket money, who knows what will pop out.

With the next generation space telescope, James Webb 6.5 meter, we may be able to determine if exoplanets nearby have atmospheres. This scope will be launched in 2018 and will be stationed at lagrange point L2. Hubble is only 2.4 meters.

Within 10 years we'll have 40 meter earth based scopes capable of directly imaging exoplanets. My money's on the ELT.

Actually, thanks to the Hubble, we've already done that.

We don't have to wait that long. Kepler may have already have found the first exomoon.

I worry about problems with the Webb because it can't be serviced. The Hubble would never have worked right had it not been repeatedly been repaired by astronauts.

I'm wondering how approval for the Thirty Meter Telescope is going in Hawaii given they had to stop construction due to legal action by native Hawaiian groups.

A legitimate concern. Parking Webb at L2 means no service missions for at least the foreseeable future. I think an Orion mission could get there but it's still a long ride, farther than going to the Moon. I mean, L2 is an ideal spot for a large space telescope but it kinda has to work right out of the box or it's toast.

At least one of the service missions to Hubble could have been avoided if they'd done a full test before launch, but that was ditched due to budgetary pressures (it would have added an extra million or so to the cost). Had they done this, they would have spotted the mirror problem and corrected it at far less expense than what the repair mission cost. According to the folks I know who work for NASA, they're testing everything they possibly can before sending the Webb into space, because they know the odds of fixing it once it gets out there are nil.

True about the failure to test Hubble properly.

Though IIRC it wasn't that they didn't test the mirror for the discrepancies at all but that their testing apparatus was also flawed.

NASA didn't do the test.

Point taken. though IIRC the first "Hubble repair" mission was in fact part of the long scheduled initial servicing of the telescope.

So it isn't like they would've saved much money.

According to the article I just linked to, failing to do the test added $100 million to the cost of the Hubble.

Sounds about right. They removed one of the least important, least used instruments aboard Hubble and inserted the corrective optics package in its place.

interesting concept. not one does-all probe but dozens or hundreds of specialists. why not.

are they going to break using ACs solar wind or just zip by? also, how would breaking work within our own solar system?

Even at the rapid time scale they're talking about, I'll still be dead when the data gets back to Earth.

IIRC the discoverer of Pluto died before New Horizons got there. It was in the planning stages when he died though. IIRC they sent some of his ashes along. A nice gesture.

IIRC you can use a magnetic sail, much of the research being conducted by Mars Direct pioneer Robert Zubrin, to brake once you get close to a star.

Then there's this going on quietly:

Before going to Proxima Centauri, or one or both of the stars of Alpha Centauri, these probes could do lots of awesome work right here in the solar system.