The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has supported the Swarming Proxima Centauri initiative, which involves sending thousands of small unmanned aerial vehicles with solar sails to the Alpha Centauri star system closest to Earth. According to the official statement, the concept was selected for the first phase of development of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. Web site Space Agency.
The Swarming Proxima Centauri project was developed by the Space Initiative. According to Marshall Eubanks, the organization’s chief scientist, Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, is 4.25 light years, or 40 trillion kilometers, away from our planet.
For comparison, the record for the farthest distance ever traveled by a spacecraft belongs to the Voyager 1 probe and is 24 billion kilometers. The device covered this path in 46 years and reached a maximum speed of 61.5 thousand kilometers per hour. Therefore, missions to other stars using current rocket technology are incredibly time-consuming and impractical.
The Space Initiative has proposed solving this problem by creating many small autonomous probes weighing no more than a gram and equipping them with solar sails instead of conventional engines. This fleet is proposed to be accelerated using a laser beam with a power of 100 gigawatts, which will allow the drones to move at speeds of up to 20% of the speed of light, which is approximately 215.8 million kilometers per hour, or 3.5 thousand. Many times faster than Voyager 1. Thus, a swarm of microships will reach the neighboring star system in approximately 24 years.
Marshall Eubanks stated that the project could be completed around 2050, with Earth’s solar fleet reaching Proxima Centauri and its Earth-like planet Proxima b as early as 2075.
Previous scientists designed A solar sail that can accelerate objects up to 20% of the speed of light.