Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking are teaming up to send 100-million-mile-per-hour bots deep into space.
The $100 million initiative intends to develop light-propelled nanocrafts that will get us to Alpha Centauri, the next closest star system to the Solar System. Keep in mind that while it's the next closest, it's still roughly 25 trillion miles away. And they're planning to make it happen in the next 20 years.
"Technologically, there’s a feasible path to getting to a star within our generation," said former astronaut Mae Jemison at the initiative's press conference.
Researchers are interested in Alpha Centauri because it has exoplanets that could possibly contain an Earth-like one that could be habitable.
The new space exploration initiative announced Tuesday is called the "Breakthrough Starshot," along with the news that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be joining the group's board.
Hawking has previously said we need to colonize space to survive as a species.
"Earth is a wonderful place, but it might not last forever," Hawking commented in a press release. “Sooner or later, we must look to the stars.”
Milner is best known for his investments in companies like Facebook, Spotify, and Twitter. For his part, Milner has invested in other science initiatives and worked with Hawking in the past. Most recently, in July 2015, Milner announced he would spend $100 million on massive telescopes in search of other planets.
The program will be led by Pete Worden, the former director of NASA AMES Research Center, and will be advised by a team of engineers and scientists. The board includes Stephen Hawking, Yuri Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Ann Druyan, the Creative Director of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message and a co-writer of the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos, Freeman Dyson, a Princeton theoretical physicist and
"It lifts many boats and drives people to work towards an inspiring goal," said Loeb this afternoon.
The "Breakthrough Starshot" has two main components:
1. Nanocrafts: Tiny, gram-scale bots with two main parts: 1) a StarChip, or gram-scale wafer ferrying cameras, photon thrusters, power supply, navigation and communication equipment, 2) Lightsail: a meter-scale sail that's a few hundred atoms thick and at gram-scale mass.
2. Light beamers: Phased arrays of lasers that could allegedly be scaled up to the 100 gigawatt level.
The mission to Alpha Centauri would take years and require a budget roughly the size of the largest existing scientific experiments. But once finished, the path to space might look something like this, according to Hawking and Milner:
- Build a ground-based kilometer-scale light beamer at high altitude
- Create a system capable of generating and storing a few gigawatt hours of energy per launch
- Launch a "mothership" carrying thousands of tiny, iPhone-seize bots to a high-altitude orbit
- Focus the light beam on the lightsail to accelerate the individual bots, or "nanocrafts," to the target speed
- Take images of a planet and transmit them back to Earth with an on-board laser communications system
- Use the same light beamer that launched the bots continue pulling data from them four years later
The 20-year timeframe might sound ambitious. But this afternoon, Milner said "For the first time we can say with conviction that it can be done in such timeframe."
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