5 ms·
That’s a really pessimistic take. Voyager 1 moves at ~17 km/s (and slowing down but it doesn’t really matter). That’s on the order of 0.0001 c and indeed just a
by Sharlin 2y ago
That’s a really pessimistic take. Voyager 1 moves at ~17 km/s (and slowing down but it doesn’t really matter). That’s on the order of 0.0001 c and indeed just a half of Earth’s orbital speed, so a part of the year the probe is actually getting closer in Earth’s frame.
A one-kg nanoprobe attaining 0.001 c would be perfectly feasible with today’s tech and would overtake Voyager 1 within a decade. Breakthrough Starshot proposes laser sail acceleration of gram-scale probes to > 0.1 c, a thousand times faster than V1, and nothing in the design requires fundamentally new tech. Such probes would claim the distance record in a few weeks of travel, no matter whether they’re launched twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now.
- adaml_623 2y agoWhat scientific return are we getting from a gram sized probe moving at 30,000 km per second?
- peterlada 2y agoToday: almost certainly nothing In a decade: almost certainly very little In a century: almost certainly more than the Voyager
- AlecSchueler 2y agoAssuming climate change doesn't prevent any kind of launch or most further research.
- tamaharbor 2y agoWouldn’t the reduction in atmospheric density due to warming make it easier to reach orbit, etc?
- AlecSchueler 2y agoYes but widespread flooding, drought, crop failures and economic collapses etc. would make it much harder to devote resources towards such launches.
- londons_explore 2y agoModern silicon design with mems sensors I suspect could do an awful lot with a gram. Also, at this scale, not much can be done by hand, so you can make hundreds of them for not much more cost than doing one.
- bpfrh 2y agoDoesn't modern electronics require massive shielding? e.g. you would need too much shielding and would go over the 1 gram restriction.
- minitoar 2y agoIf you have enough of them you can just lose some fraction and still function.
- flaminHotSpeedo 2y agoAlso it may work out that a lighter, faster probe with a shorter service life could have a greater effective range, if the service life is less sensitive to weight changes than the speed is
- minitoar 2y agoRight, that’s a nice way of thinking about it.
- SoftTalker 2y agoAnd how do you get the data back from these probes? The voyagers have antennas that are close to 4 meters in diameter and ~25-watt radio transmitters. You aren't doing that in a gram, and you aren't powering that in a gram either.
- minitoar 2y agoJust go read the starshot proposal. They address all of these issues, some more convincingly than others but they have thought it out in great detail. In short, it’s a swarm of gram-scale probes and they work together to transmit.
- mynameisvlad 2y agoThe claim was that it would always be the furthest man made object in the universe. Nothing about it being useful or scientific.
- Scarblac 2y agoIf its not useful, it's not going to be launched and accelerated that long.
- mynameisvlad 2y agoPeople do things for shits and giggles all the time. SpaceX literally launched a model Tesla for absolutely no reason other than advertising both themselves and their sister company. Doubly so if they can now become “the furthest man made object”. That’s massive free marketing. It may also be exponentially easier to do so in the future, lowering the expenditure needed to make it happen. It might not be reasonable right now, but, once again, the bar was set at always. That is an exceptionally high bar with very little reasoning behind it.
- digitallis42 2y agoThey absolutely had way more of a reason than no reason. Za reason for the Tesla launch was that it was the first falcon 9 heavy launch, and no company was willing to gamble that large of a payload on a untested rocket. So they made the best of it with a PR stunt.
- mynameisvlad 2y agoThey literally could have sent up anything and it certainly wasn’t useful, which was GP’s only criteria for being launched.
- serf 2y ago>scientific return that comes after 'someone out there' misinterprets our super fast gram probes as weaponry and conquers our world for the sake of their own spacecraft safety. it's ingenious really, let's antagonize a greater power into wormhole-bridge hopping over here so we can reverse engineer their tech. /s , hopefully.
- lolc 2y agoIf they are so much as inconvenienced by our probes, they are not a greater power but bumbling roboticists like us.
- withinboredom 2y ago1 gram at an appreciable amount of c is about as much energy as a nuke. Getting hit by a swarm of these while on a Sunday drive would fuck you up, no matter how powerful you are. The real reason there isn’t a moon colony? Person gets fired and loses their shit, starts tossing 1-2 km sized rocks down the gravity well and … we all die. Throwing shit in space is a sure fire way to piss off any species.
- kadoban 2y agoIt would take an insane amount of energy to throw that rock.
- withinboredom 2y agoBut you only need one. Maybe two for good measure
- kadoban 2y agoSame with a nuke or an engineered pathogen. Throwing rocks from the Moon is less practical though, people would see you setting up the universe's biggest launch pad or railgun for years. It would be the least stealthy, most telegraphed apocalypse possible.
- Sharlin 2y agoIf you have enough of them, you get data from Alpha Centauri within a human (natural) lifetime. Plus the bragging rights, I guess, Starshot is after all a private endeavour.
- karaterobot 2y agoI don't see a date announced for launch, and I see a lot of technology that needs to be invented for this to be feasible. How likely is it to happen within the next 10 years? I'm just thinking about my old roommate, a space science postdoc, who told me about all these cool propulsion projects that sounded very feasible. That was—sheesh—20 years ago, and I keep waiting for any of them to be real.
- Sharlin 2y agoIt's just a question of funding. There's nothing that's needed to accelerate small enough probe on an escape trajectory at a few hundred km/s except plain old chemical rockets with enough stages. If we can accelerate a >500 kg probe to 20 km/s, we can certainly use an extra stage with 400 kg of propellant to boost a 1 kg probe to much higher velocities. And nobody talked about the next ten years. The GP said "fifty years", which is way too long a time span to have any certainty whatsoever as to what will happen. GP's assertion was 100% ludicrously overconfident.
- karaterobot 2y agoJust a note: I responded directly to a comment that said it could be built with today's tech, let alone 10, 20, or 50 years.