New research from the Institute for Interstellar Studies explains how swarms of thousands of tiny spacecraft could maintain communications with Earth while exploring nearby stars.
Project Starshot, an initiative sponsored by the Breakthrough Foundation, is intended to be humanity’s first interstellar voyage. Credit: breakthroughinitiatives.org
“Realistic limits in the foreseeable future to a laser launch system impose an upper limit on what you can push with the laser up to near-relativistic speeds . If we want to send spacecraft to the nearest stars in anything like a reasonable time , we will be limited to gram-scale spacecraft. However, that is the limit to the single spacecraft mass. The major fixed cost is in the ‘system,’ not in the marginal cost of the tiny spacecraft themselves or the energy to launch them.
The team also developed a simple and cost-effective power source for their probes, a betavoltaic isotopic application. This, they argue, could provide each probe with enough electricity to power optical communications at interstellar ranges for decades. During the 20-year cruise phase, the swarm would dynamically coalesce from its long string formation into a lens-shaped network measuring about 100,000 km in diameter, which would be centered on the destination by the time of fly-by.
Beyond the ability to maintain contact with the probes, the swarm concept also presents solutions to the problem of interstellar dust grains. With over one thousand tiny probes, the swarm could tolerate significant attrition and still be able to provide significant data returns upon arrival. The swarm concept also means that observations of nearby exoplanets can be viewed from multiple viewpoints.
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