Breakthrough StarsH๏τ, aninternational scientific effort, has revealed their plans to launch a probe toAlpha Centauri, our nearest star system, and it can reach its destination in just 20 years.

Breakthrough StarsH๏τ has plans to design and test a new form of spaceship propulsion system thatuses a light sail and a laser beam array to achieve the enormous speedsnecessary for interstellar travel within our lifetimes, according to a news releasefrom the Australian National University (ANU).

Breakthrough To reach AlphaCentauri, StarsH๏τ’s ultra-lightweight spaceship will have to travel fourlight-years. To put it another way, our nearest neighboring star system is40,208,000,000,000 miles away.

Today’s fastest and mostdependable long-range space travel technology is the ion thruster, which powersNASA’s DART mission to an asteroid at 15,000 mph (24,000 km/h). However, NASAclaims that using an ion thruster would take 18,000 years or around 2,700 humangenerations to reach Alpha Centauri.

However, NASA claims that usingan ion thruster would take 18,000 years or around 2,700 human generations toreach Alpha Centauri.

The Breakthrough StarsH๏τ teamsays their spacecraft can fly to Alpha Centauri in under 20 years with the aidof Earth-based lasers. ᴀssuming the probe spacecraft makes it to its goal, itwill return the first pH๏τographs from another solar system, providing a rareglimpse of faraway worlds similar to Earth.

The ANU researchers describedtheir proposal in a recent research study aiming to make travel to AlphaCentauri viable. The team is building a small probe with a lightsail driven byan Earth laser array. An intergalactic laser array will focus millions of beamson the sail, allowing it to travel at astounding speeds.

In order to go between AlphaCentauri and our own solar system, we need to think outside the box, says Dr.Bandutunga of the ANU Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics’ Applied MetrologyLaboratories.

“Once on its way, the sailwill fly through the vacuum of space for 20 years before reaching itsdestination. During its flyby of Alpha Centauri, it will record images andscientific measurements which it will broadcast back to Earth.”

Breakthrough StarsH๏τ and theANU team rely on the evolution of many important technologies to create theirspacecraft. Lightsails, for example, have just lately been demonstrated to be afeasible mode of space travel. LightSail 2, a Carl Sagan-inspired spacecraft,successfully lifted its orbital trajectory around Earth by 3.2 kilometers in2019 using a lightsail, or solarsail, driven by pH๏τons from the Sun.

The key obstacle will be theANU team’s cutting-edge laser array plan, which would require millions oflasers to synch. 

“The Breakthrough StarsH๏τprogram estimates the total required optical power to be about 100 GW — about100 times the capacity of the world’s largest battery today,” Dr. Ward,from the ANU Research School of Physics, says. “To achieve this, we estimatethe number of lasers required to be approximately 100 million.”

The ANU team suggests employinga ‘guide laser’ satellite in Earth’s orbit to maintain their lasers aimingexactly at the lightsail during the voyage. With an algorithm to pre-correctthe array’s light, this will accommodate for the atmospheric distortion thatthe other Earth-bound lasers would endure.

According to Dr. Bandutunga,”the next step is to start testing some of the basic building blocks in acontrolled laboratory setting. This includes the concepts for combining smallarrays to make larger arrays and the atmospheric correctionalgorithms.” 

As well as being part of aworldwide partnership, the ANU team is only focusing on one aspect of the bigproject.

Breakthrough StarsH๏τ is one ofYuri Milner’s Breakthrough Initiatives, a set of scientific and technologicalefforts aimed at finding life outside our solar system. If the lightsailprototype is successful, it might reach the planets around our closest star,Alpha Centauri, during our lifetime. The project’s success would thereby raisehumans to the status of interstellar species. 

Reference(s): 

Breakthrough StarsH๏τ

ANU | Scientists lead ambitious study to reach infinity and beyond