Kinematics of interstellar flights

Let the flight there and the flight back consist of three phases: uniformly accelerated acceleration, flight at a constant speed and uniformly accelerated deceleration.

The proper time of any clock has the form:

where is the clock speed. The earth clock is motionless (), and their own time is equal to the coordinate. Astronauts' watches have a variable speed. Since the root under the integral remains less than one all the time, the time of these clocks, regardless of the explicit form of the function , always turns out to be less than . As a result .

If acceleration and deceleration are relativistically uniformly accelerated (with the parameter of own acceleration ) for , and uniform motion is , then the time will pass according to the ship's clock:

, where is the hyperbolic arcsine

Consider a hypothetical flight to the star system Alpha Centauri, distant from Earth at a distance of 4.3 light years. If time is measured in years, and distances in light years, then the speed of light is equal to one, and the unit acceleration of light year / year² is close to the acceleration of gravity and is approximately equal to 9.5 m / s².

Let the spaceship move half the way with unit acceleration, and slow down the other half with the same acceleration (). Then the ship turns around and repeats the stages of acceleration and deceleration. In this situation, the flight time in the earth's reference system will be approximately 12 years, while according to the clock on the ship, 7.3 years will pass. The maximum speed of the ship will reach 0.95 of the speed of light.

In 64 years of proper time, a spacecraft with unity acceleration could potentially make a trip (returning to Earth) to the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light years away. years . On Earth, during such a flight, about 5 million years will pass. By developing twice as much acceleration (to which a trained person can quite get used to under certain conditions and using a number of devices, for example, suspended animation), one can even think about an expedition to the visible edge of the Universe (about 14 billion light years), which will take astronauts about 50 years; however, returning from such an expedition (after 28 billion years according to earth clocks), its participants run the risk of not finding alive not only the Earth and the Sun, but even our Galaxy. Based on these calculations, in order for astronauts to avoid future shock upon returning to Earth, a reasonable radius of accessibility for interstellar expeditions with a return should not exceed several tens of light years, unless, of course, any fundamentally new physical principles of movement in space-time are discovered. However, the discovery of numerous exoplanets suggests that planetary systems are found near a sufficiently large proportion of stars, so astronauts will have something to explore in this radius (for example, the planetary systems ε Eridanus and Gliese 581).

Suitability of various types of engines for interstellar flights

The suitability of various types of engines for interstellar flight was reviewed at a meeting of the British Interplanetary Society in 1973 by Tony Martin. A nuclear-powered electric propulsion has little acceleration, so it will take centuries to reach the right speed, allowing it to be used only in generation ships. Thermal nuclear engines of the NERVA type have a sufficient amount of thrust, but a low speed of the expiration of the working mass, on the order of 5-10 km / s, so a huge amount of fuel will be required to accelerate to the desired speed. Thus, a ship with such an engine will be several orders of magnitude slower than a ship with an electric propulsion engine. For a flight to a neighboring star on such a ship, it will take tens and hundreds of thousands of years (a flight to Alpha Centauri at a speed of 30 km / s will take 40 thousand years). A ramjet would require a huge diameter funnel to collect rarefied interstellar hydrogen, which has a density of 1 atom per cubic centimeter. If a super-powerful electromagnetic field is used to collect interstellar hydrogen, then the force loads on the generating coil will be so great that it seems unlikely even for the technology of the future to overcome them.

Interstellar expedition projects

Starship-rocket projects

Orion Project

The rocket ship designed by the Daedalus project turned out to be so huge that it would have had to be built in outer space. It was supposed to weigh 54,000 tons (almost all the weight is rocket fuel) and could accelerate to 7.1% of the speed of light, carrying a payload weighing 450 tons. Unlike the Orion project, designed to use tiny atomic bombs , the Daedalus project involved the use of miniature hydrogen bombs with a mixture of deuterium and helium-3 and an ignition system using electron beams. But huge technical problems and concerns about nuclear propulsion meant that the Daedalus project was also put on hold indefinitely.

The technological ideas of Daedalus are used in the Ikarus thermonuclear starship project.

Starship projects driven by the pressure of electromagnetic waves.

In 1971, in a report by G. Marx at a symposium in Byurakan, it was proposed to use X-ray lasers for interstellar flights. Later, the possibility of using this type of propulsion was investigated by NASA. As a result, the following conclusion was made: “If the possibility of creating a laser operating in the X-ray wavelength range is found, then we can talk about the real development of an aircraft (accelerated by such a laser beam) that can cover the distances to the nearest stars much faster than all known currently systems with rocket engines. Calculations show that with the help of the space system considered in this paper, it is possible to reach the star Alpha Centauri ... in about 10 years.

In 1985, R. Forward proposed the design of an interstellar probe accelerated by microwave energy. The project envisaged that the probe would reach the nearest stars in 21 years.

At the 36th International Astronomical Congress, a project was proposed for a laser starship, the movement of which is provided by the energy of optical lasers located in orbit around Mercury. According to calculations, the path of a starship of this design to the star Epsilon Eridani (10.8 light years) and back would take 51 years.

The advantage of a solar sailboat is the lack of fuel on board. Its disadvantage is that it cannot be used to sail back to Earth, so it is good for launching robotic probes, stations and cargo ships, but not very suitable for manned return flights (or astronauts will need to bring a second laser with a supply of fuel to install at the destination , which actually negates all the advantages of a sailboat).

Annihilation engines

Theoretical calculations by the American physicists Ronan Keane and Wei-ming Zhang show that, based on modern technologies, it is possible to create an annihilation engine capable of accelerating a spacecraft up to 70% of the speed of light. The engine they proposed is faster than other theoretical developments due to the special design of the nozzle. However, the main problems in creating annihilation rockets ( English) with similar engines are obtaining the required amount of antimatter, as well as its storage. As of May 2011, the record storage time for antihydrogen atoms was 1000 seconds (~16.5 minutes). A 2006 NASA estimate cost approximately US$25 million to produce a milligram of positrons. One gram of antihydrogen would be worth $62.5 trillion, according to a 1999 estimate.

Direct-flow engines powered by interstellar hydrogen

The main component of the mass of modern rockets is the mass of fuel needed for the rocket to accelerate. If it is possible in some way to use the environment surrounding the rocket as a working fluid and fuel, it is possible to significantly reduce the mass of the rocket and achieve high speeds of movement due to this.

Another disadvantage of a thermonuclear ramjet is the limited speed that a ship equipped with it can achieve (no more than 0.119 c= 35.7 thousand km/s). This is due to the fact that when trapping each hydrogen atom (which can be considered stationary relative to the stars in the first approximation), the ship loses a certain momentum, which can be compensated by the engine thrust only if the speed does not exceed a certain limit. To overcome this limitation, it is necessary to utilize the kinetic energy of trapped atoms as completely as possible, which seems to be a rather difficult task.

Let's say the screen caught 4 hydrogen atoms. During the operation of a thermonuclear reactor, four protons turn into one alpha particle, two positrons and two neutrinos. For simplicity, we will neglect neutrinos (taking into account neutrinos will require an accurate calculation of all stages of the reaction, and the losses on neutrinos are about a percent), and we will annihilate positrons with 2 electrons left from hydrogen atoms after the removal of protons from them. Another 2 electrons will be used to turn the alpha particle into a neutral helium atom, which, thanks to the energy received from the reaction, will be accelerated in the engine nozzle.

The final reaction equation without taking into account neutrinos:

4edit] Photon engine on magnetic monopoles

If some variants of the Grand Unification theories are valid, such as the "t Hooft-Polyakov" model, then it is possible to build a photon engine that does not use antimatter, since the magnetic monopole can hypothetically catalyze the decay of a proton into a positron and a π 0 meson:

π 0 quickly decays into 2 photons, and the positron annihilates with an electron, as a result, the hydrogen atom turns into 4 photons, and only the mirror problem remains unresolved.

A photon engine based on magnetic monopoles could also work in a direct-flow scheme.

At the same time, magnetic monopoles are absent in most modern theories of the Grand Unification, which casts doubt on this attractive idea.

Interstellar Spaceship Braking Systems

Several methods have been proposed:

1. Braking on internal sources - rocket

2. Braking due to a laser beam sent from the solar system.

3. Braking by a magnetic field using Zubrin's Magnetic Sail on superconductors.

Generation ships

Interstellar travel is also possible using starships that implement the concept of "generation ships" (for example, like the O'Neill colonies). In such spaceships, a closed biosphere is created and maintained, capable of maintaining and reproducing itself for several thousand years. The flight takes place at low speed and takes a very long time, during which many generations of astronauts have time to change.

Dangers of the external environment

This problem was considered in detail by Ivan Korznikov in the article "Reality of interstellar flights". The collision with interstellar dust will occur at near-light speeds and will resemble microexplosions in terms of physical impact. At speeds greater than 0.1 C, the protective screen must have a thickness of tens of meters and a mass of hundreds of thousands of tons. But this screen will reliably protect only from interstellar dust. A collision with a meteorite will have fatal consequences. Ivan Korznikov calculates that at a speed of more than 0.1 C, the spacecraft will not have time to change its flight path and avoid a collision. Ivan Korznikov believes that at sublight speed, the spacecraft will collapse before reaching the target. In his opinion, interstellar travel is possible only at significantly lower speeds (up to 0.01 C).

Energy and resources

Interstellar flight will require large reserves of energy and resources that will have to be carried with you. This is one of the little-studied problems in interstellar astronautics.

For example, the most advanced Daedalus project to date with a pulsed thermonuclear engine would have reached Barnard's Star (six light years) in half a century, spending 50 thousand tons of thermonuclear fuel (a mixture of deuterium and helium-3) and delivering a useful mass of 4 thousand to the target. tons

In our Galaxy alone, the distances between star systems are unimaginably huge. If aliens from outer space really visit the Earth, the level of their technical development should be a hundred times higher than the current level of our earthly one.

A few light years away

To denote the distances between stars, astronomers introduced the concept of "light year". The speed of light is the fastest in the universe: 300,000 km/s!

The width of our Galaxy is 100,000 light years. To cover such a huge distance, aliens from other planets need to build a spaceship, the speed of which is equal to or even exceeds the speed of light.

Scientists believe that a material object cannot move faster than the speed of light. However, earlier they believed that it was impossible to develop supersonic speed, but in 1947 the Bell X-1 model aircraft successfully broke the sound barrier.

Perhaps in the future, when humanity has accumulated more knowledge about the physical laws of the universe, earthlings will be able to build a spaceship that will move at the speed of light and even faster.

Great Journeys

Even if aliens are able to move through space at the speed of light, such a journey should take many years. For earthlings, whose average life expectancy is 80 years, this would be impossible. However, each species of living beings has its own life cycle. For example, in California, USA, there are bristlecone pines that are already 5,000 years old.

Who knows how long aliens live? Maybe several thousand? Then interstellar flights lasting hundreds of years are common for them.

Shortcuts

It is likely that aliens have found shortcuts through outer space - gravitational "holes", or distortions of space formed by gravity. Such places in the Universe could become a kind of bridges - the shortest paths between celestial bodies located at different ends of the Universe.

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Our reader Nikita Ageev asks: what is the main problem of interstellar flights? The answer, like , will require a large article, although the question can be answered with a single character: c .

The speed of light in a vacuum, c, is about 300,000 kilometers per second and cannot be exceeded. Therefore, it is impossible to reach the stars in less than a few years (light takes 4.243 years to reach Proxima Centauri, so the spacecraft cannot arrive even faster). If we add the time for acceleration and deceleration with a more or less acceptable acceleration for a person, then we get about ten years to the nearest star.

What are the conditions to fly?

And this period is already a significant obstacle in itself, even if we ignore the question "how to accelerate to a speed close to the speed of light." Now there are no spaceships that would allow the crew to live autonomously in space for so long - astronauts are constantly brought fresh supplies from Earth. Usually, a conversation about the problems of interstellar travel begins with more fundamental questions, but we will start with purely applied problems.

Even half a century after Gagarin's flight, engineers could not create a washing machine and a fairly practical shower for spacecraft, and toilets designed for weightlessness break down on the ISS with enviable regularity. A flight to at least Mars (22 light minutes instead of 4 light years) already poses a non-trivial task for plumbing designers: so traveling to the stars will require at least inventing a space toilet with a twenty-year warranty and the same washing machine.

Water for washing, washing and drinking will also have to either be taken with you or reused. As well as air, and food, too, must either be stored or grown on board. Experiments to create a closed ecosystem on Earth have already been carried out, but their conditions are still very different from those in space, at least in the presence of gravity. Mankind knows how to turn the contents of a chamber pot into clean drinking water, but in this case it is required to be able to do this in zero gravity, with absolute reliability and without a truckload of consumables: taking a truckload of filter cartridges to the stars is too expensive.

Washing socks and protecting against intestinal infections may seem like too banal, "non-physical" restrictions on interstellar flights - but any experienced traveler will confirm that "little things" like uncomfortable shoes or upset stomach from unfamiliar food on an autonomous expedition can turn into a threat to life.

The solution of even elementary everyday problems requires the same serious technological base as the development of fundamentally new space engines. If on Earth a worn-out gasket in a toilet bowl can be bought at the nearest store for two rubles, then already on a Martian spacecraft it is necessary to provide either a reserve all similar parts, or a three-dimensional printer for the production of spare parts from universal plastic raw materials.

In the US Navy in 2013 in earnest engaged in 3D printing after assessing the time and cost of repairing military equipment using traditional methods in the field. The military reasoned that it was easier to print some rare gasket for a helicopter assembly that had been discontinued ten years ago than to order a part from a warehouse on another mainland.

One of Korolev's closest associates, Boris Chertok, wrote in his memoir Rockets and People that at some point the Soviet space program was faced with a shortage of plug contacts. Reliable connectors for multicore cables had to be developed separately.

In addition to spare parts for equipment, food, water and air, astronauts will need energy. The energy will be needed by the engine and on-board equipment, so the problem of a powerful and reliable source will have to be solved separately. Solar batteries are not suitable, if only because of the distance from the stars in flight, radioisotope generators (they feed the Voyagers and New Horizons) do not provide the power required for a large manned spacecraft, and they still have not learned how to make full-fledged nuclear reactors for space.

The Soviet nuclear-powered satellite program was marred by an international scandal following the fall of Kosmos-954 in Canada, as well as a series of failures with less dramatic consequences; similar work in the US was curtailed even earlier. Now Rosatom and Roskosmos intend to create a space nuclear power plant, but these are still installations for short flights, and not a long-term journey to another star system.

Perhaps, instead of a nuclear reactor, tokamaks will be used in future interstellar ships. About how difficult it is to at least correctly determine the parameters of a thermonuclear plasma, at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology this summer. By the way, the ITER project on Earth is moving forward successfully: even those who entered the first year today have every chance to join the work on the first experimental thermonuclear reactor with a positive energy balance.

What to fly?

Ordinary rocket engines are not suitable for acceleration and deceleration of an interstellar spacecraft. Those who are familiar with the mechanics course, which is taught at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in the first semester, can independently calculate how much fuel a rocket will need to reach at least one hundred thousand kilometers per second. For those who are not yet familiar with the Tsiolkovsky equation, we will immediately announce the result - the mass of fuel tanks is significantly higher than the mass of the solar system.

It is possible to reduce the fuel supply by increasing the speed at which the engine ejects the working fluid, gas, plasma, or something else, up to a beam of elementary particles. Currently, plasma and ion thrusters are actively used for flights of automatic interplanetary stations within the solar system or for correction of the orbit of geostationary satellites, but they have a number of other disadvantages. In particular, all such engines give too little thrust, so far they cannot give the ship an acceleration of several meters per second squared.

MIPT Vice-Rector Oleg Gorshkov is one of the recognized experts in the field of plasma engines. Engines of the SPD series are produced at the Fakel Design Bureau, these are serial products for correcting the orbit of communication satellites.

In the 1950s, an engine project was being developed that would use the impulse of a nuclear explosion (Project Orion), but it is far from being a ready-made solution for interstellar flights. Even less developed is the design of the engine, which uses the magnetohydrodynamic effect, that is, it accelerates due to interaction with interstellar plasma. Theoretically, the spacecraft could "suck" the plasma in and throw it back with the creation of jet thrust, but there is another problem.

How to survive?

Interstellar plasma is primarily protons and helium nuclei, if we consider heavy particles. When moving at speeds of the order of hundreds of thousands of kilometers per second, all these particles acquire energy in megaelectronvolts or even tens of megaelectronvolts - the same amount as the products of nuclear reactions have. The density of the interstellar medium is about one hundred thousand ions per cubic meter, which means that in a second a square meter of the ship's skin will receive about 10 13 protons with energies of tens of MeV.

One electron volt, eV,― this is the energy that an electron acquires when flying from one electrode to another with a potential difference of one volt. Light quanta have such energy, and ultraviolet quanta with higher energy are already capable of damaging DNA molecules. Radiation or particles with energies in megaelectronvolts accompanies nuclear reactions and, in addition, is itself capable of causing them.

Such irradiation corresponds to an absorbed energy (assuming that all the energy is absorbed by the skin) of tens of joules. Moreover, this energy will come not just in the form of heat, but may be partially spent on initiating nuclear reactions in the material of the ship with the formation of short-lived isotopes: in other words, the skin will become radioactive.

Part of the incident protons and helium nuclei can be deflected to the side by a magnetic field, and a complex shell of many layers can be protected from induced radiation and secondary radiation, but these problems also have not yet been solved. In addition, the fundamental difficulties of the form “what material will be least destroyed by irradiation” at the stage of servicing the ship in flight will turn into particular problems - “how to unscrew four bolts by 25 in a compartment with a background of fifty millisieverts per hour.”

Recall that during the last repair of the Hubble telescope, the astronauts at first failed to unscrew the four bolts that fastened one of the cameras. After conferring with Earth, they replaced the torque wrench with a regular wrench and applied brute force. The bolts started to move, the camera was successfully replaced. If the stuck bolt had been torn off at the same time, the second expedition would have cost half a billion US dollars. Or it wouldn't have happened at all.

Are there workarounds?

In science fiction (often more fantasy than science), interstellar travel is accomplished through "subspace tunnels". Formally, Einstein's equations, which describe the geometry of space-time depending on the mass and energy distributed in this space-time, do allow something similar - only the estimated energy costs are even more depressing than the estimates of the amount of rocket fuel for a flight to Proxima Centauri. Not only is a lot of energy needed, but also the energy density must be negative.

The question of whether it is possible to create a stable, large and energetically possible "wormhole" is tied to fundamental questions about the structure of the Universe as a whole. One of the unsolved physical problems is the lack of gravity in the so-called Standard Model - a theory that describes the behavior of elementary particles and three of the four fundamental physical interactions. The vast majority of physicists are rather skeptical that there is a place for interstellar “jumps through hyperspace” in the quantum theory of gravity, but, strictly speaking, no one forbids trying to look for a workaround for flights to the stars.

Can we actually get to unknown planets outside the solar system? How is this even possible?

Fantasts and cinematographers, of course, well done, did a good job. I really want to believe in colorful stories where a person conquers the farthest corners of space. Unfortunately, before this picture becomes a reality, we will have to overcome many limitations. For example, the laws of physics as we see them now.

But! In recent years, several volunteer and privately funded organizations have emerged (Tau Zero Foundation, Project Icarus, Project Breakthrough Starshot), each of which aims to create vehicles for interstellar flights and bring humanity closer to conquering the universe. Their hope and faith in success are strengthened by positive news, for example, in the orbit of the star Proxima-Centaurus, a planet the size of the Earth.

The creation of an interstellar spacecraft will be one of the topics of discussion at the BBC Future World Summit "Ideas that change the world" in Sydney in November. Will humans be able to travel to other galaxies? And if so, what types of spacecraft will we need for this?

Where would we go?

Where shouldn't you fly? There are more stars in the Universe than there are grains of sand on Earth - about 70 sextillion (that's 22 zeros after the seven) - and, according to scientists, billions of them have one to three planets in their orbits in the so-called "Goldilocks zone": there are not too many cold and not too hot. Just right .

From the very beginning and until now, the best contender for the first interstellar flight has been our nearest neighbor, the triple star system Alpha Centauri. It is located at a distance of 4.37 light years from Earth. This year, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory discovered an Earth-sized planet orbiting the red dwarf Proxima Centauri in this constellation. The planet, named Proxima b, has at least 1.3 times the Earth's mass and has a very short orbital period around its star, only 11 Earth days. But still, this news was extremely exciting for astronomers and exoplanet hunters, because the temperature regime of Proxima b is suitable for the existence of water in liquid form, and this is a serious plus for possible habitability.

But there are downsides: we don't know if Proxima b has an atmosphere, and given its proximity to Proxima Centauri (closer than Mercury to the Sun), it is likely to be affected by stellar plasma emissions and radiation. And it is so locked up by tidal forces that it always faces the star on one side. This, of course, can completely change our understanding of day and night.

And how do we get there?

This is the $64 trillion question. Even at the maximum speed that modern technology allows us to develop, we are 18 thousand years from Proxima B. And it is highly likely that having reached the goal we will meet there ... our descendants in the Earth, who have already colonized a new planet and took all the glory for themselves. Therefore, deep minds and bottomless pockets set themselves an ambitious task: to find a faster way to cross huge distances.

Breakthrough Starshot is a $100 million space project funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. Breakthrough Starshot focused on building tiny unmanned light-sail probes propelled by a powerful ground-based laser. The idea is that a spacecraft of a sufficiently small weight (barely 1 gram) with a light sail can be regularly accelerated by a powerful light beam from Earth to about one-fifth the speed of light. At this rate, nanoprobes will reach Alpha Centauri in about 20 years.

The developers of the Breakthrough Starshot project are counting on the miniaturization of all technologies, because a tiny space probe must carry a camera, thrusters, power supply, communications and navigation equipment. All in order to announce upon arrival: “Look, I'm here. And she doesn't move at all." Miller hopes this will work and lay the groundwork for the next, more complex phase of interstellar travel: human travel.

What about warp drives?

Yes, in the Star Trek series it all looks very simple: turned on the warp drive and flew faster than the speed of light. But everything we currently know about the laws of physics tells us that travel faster than or equal to the speed of light is impossible. But scientists don't give up: NASA, inspired by another exciting sci-fi engine, has launched the NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT for short), an ion thruster that can accelerate spacecraft to 145,000 km/h using just one fraction of propellant for a conventional rocket.

But even at these speeds, we won't be able to fly far from the solar system in one human lifetime. Until we figure out how to work with spacetime, interstellar travel will be very, very slow. Perhaps it's time to begin to see the time that galactic wanderers will spend aboard an interstellar ship as simply life, and not as a trip on a "space bus" from point A to point B.

How will we survive interstellar travel?

Warp drives and ion drives are all very cool, of course, but none of this will be of much use if our interstellar wanderers die from starvation, cold, dehydration or lack of oxygen before they even leave the solar system. Researcher Rachel Armstrong argues that it's time for us to think about creating a true ecosystem for interstellar humanity.

“We are moving from an industrial view to an ecological view of reality,” says Armstrong.

Armstrong, a professor of experimental architecture at Newcastle University in the UK, says of worlding: "It's about the space of the environment, not just the design of the object." Today, inside a spacecraft or station, everything is sterile and looks like an industrial facility. Armstrong thinks we should instead think about the environmental impact of spacecraft, the plants we can grow on board, and even the types of soil we can take with us. In the future, she suggests, spaceships will look like giant biomes full of organic life, not today's cold, metal boxes.

Can't we just sleep the whole way?

Cryosleep and hibernation are, of course, a good solution to a rather unpleasant problem: how to keep people alive during a journey that lasts much longer than human life itself. At least that's how they do it in the movies. And the world is full of cryo-optimists: the Alcor Life Extension Foundation stores many cryopreserved bodies and heads of people who hope that our descendants will learn how to safely defrost people and get rid of now incurable diseases, but at present such technologies do not exist.

Movies like Interstellar and books like Neil Stevenson's Seveneves have come up with the idea of ​​sending frozen embryos into space that could survive even the longest flight because they don't need to eat, drink or breathe. But this brings up the chicken-and-egg problem: someone has to take care of this nascent humanity at an unconscious age.

So is it all real?

“Since the dawn of mankind, we have looked up to the stars and turned our hopes and fears, anxieties and dreams to them,” says Rachel Armstrong.

With the launch of new engineering projects such as Breakthrough Starshot, "a dream becomes a real experiment."

The expression - "Fly to the Moon" evokes associations on the verge of fantasy for most of us, comparable only to projects like Apollo 11 (Apollo 11) to deliver a person to the surface of the moon. The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative is taking us much further than the moon, as its goal is to travel to the nearest solar systems.

Interstellar travel:

The brainchild of Yuri Milner: billionaire, techno innovator, native of Russia, the Breakthrough Starshot project was announced at a press conference in April 2016 with the participation of such famous scientists as Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson. The essence of the technology is as follows - thousands of plate-shaped chips attached to a large light sail made of silver will be placed in Earth's orbit. This sail would then be literally propelled into deep space by a beam of laser beams from the ground.

In just two minutes of directional action of lasers, the space sail will reach 1/5 the speed of light, which is 1000 times faster than the speeds ever developed by macroscopic objects.

During the twenty-year flight, the ship will collect data on interstellar space. Upon reaching the constellation Alpha Centauri the onboard camera will take a series of high-precision images and send them back to Earth. This will give us the opportunity to look at the nearest planetary neighbors and understand how they can be suitable for colonization.

The Breakthrough Starshot team is just as impressive as the idea itself. The board of directors included Milner, Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg. Pete Vorden, Former Head of NASA Ames Research Center Appointed Executive Director (S. Pete Worden). The rest of the contributors include Nobel laureates and other advisors to the Breakthrough project. Milner is promising to contribute his own $100 million to start the project and raise another $10 billion over the next few years with the help of his colleagues.

At first glance, this may seem like science fiction, although in fact there are no scientific obstacles to the implementation of this project. This does not mean that everything will happen tomorrow. For a successful Breakthrough to the Stars, it is necessary to make a number of scientific discoveries. The participants and consultants of the project are counting on the exponential growth of technologies that will enable Breakthrough Starshot to be realized over the next 20 years.

Discovery of exoplanets

Exoplanets include all planets outside our solar system. While the first discoveries date back to 1988, as of May 1, 2017, 3,608 exoplanets have been discovered in 2,702 solar systems. Some of the planets are very similar to ours, others have a number of unique features such as rings 200 times wider than our Saturn.

The reason for this explosion of finds is a powerful breakthrough in the improvement of telescopic technologies.

Just 100 years ago, the largest telescope in the world was the Hooker Telescope, with a lens diameter of 2.5 meters. Today, the European Southern Observatory has a complex of four telescopes, each 8.2 meters in diameter. It is considered the largest ground-based structure for the study of astronomy, publishing an average of one peer-reviewed scientific paper per day.

Scientists also use MBT () and special tools to search for rocky planets in the "habitable" (allowing liquid water) zones of other solar systems. In May 2016, with the help of TRAPPIST, researchers in Chile discovered seven Earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable zone.

Meanwhile, the Kepler spacecraft (NASA Kepler), built specifically for this purpose, has already identified more than 2,000 exoplanets. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is scheduled to launch in October 2018, will open up hitherto unseen opportunities for testing exoplanets for the presence of life. “If these planets have an atmosphere, the Webb telescope will be the key to unlocking their secrets,” says Doug Hudgins, NASA Exoplanet Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Startup cost

The Starshot mothership will be lifted off the ground by a booster and then fire a thousand small records into space. The cost of launching a payload with expendable rockets is too high, but companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin are showing real hopes of using reusable rockets that will significantly reduce the cost of launch. SpaceX has already been able to cut Falcon 9 launch costs by $60 million. With an increase in the share of private space companies in the world market, launching reusable rockets will become more affordable and cheaper.

star plate

Each 15mm wafer would need to hold a host of sophisticated electronic devices such as a navigator, camera, communication laser, radioisotope battery, multiplex camera, and interface camera. The ability to complete an entire spacecraft on a tiny plate is explained by the exponential decrease in the size of sensors and chips.

In the 1960s, the first computer chips consisted of a handful of transistors. Today, thanks to Moore's law, we can fit billions of transistors on a single chip. The first digital camera weighed 8 pounds and shot 0.01 megapixels. Now digital cameras that take high-quality 12-megapixel color images fit in a smartphone with a bunch of other sensors like GPS, accelerometer and gyroscope. With the advent of smaller satellites providing better data, we are seeing all these improvements being applied to space exploration.

For Starshot to be successful, we need a chip mass of around 0.22 grams by 2030. If the pace of improvement continues, projections suggest that it is quite possible.

light sail

The sail should be made of a material that is highly reflective (to get maximum acceleration from the laser), minimally absorbent (so it doesn't burn from the heat), and also very light in weight (allowing for fast acceleration). This is an extremely complex combination and no suitable material has yet been found.

The use of artificial intelligence automation will speed up the discovery of such materials. The essence of automation lies in the fact that the machine will be able to generate a library of tens of thousands of materials for testing. This will make it much easier for engineers to select the best options for research and development.

Battery

Although Starchip will use a tiny nuclear radioisotope battery for the 24-year journey, we will still need conventional laser chemical batteries. Lasers will expend a huge amount of energy in a short amount of time, which means that the power must be stored as close as possible.

Battery capacity is growing by an average of 5-8% per year; we often do not notice this, because the energy consumption of gadgets grows proportionally, leaving the overall service life the same. If the dynamics of battery improvement continues, in 20 years they should have an increase of 3-5 times their current capacity. These expectations rely on Tesla-Solar City innovation from investment in battery technology. Companies in Kauai have already installed about 55,000 batteries to power much of their infrastructure.

lasers

Thousands of powerful lasers will be used to accelerate the sail to the speed of light.

Laser technologies followed Moore's Law at the same rate as integrated circuits, cutting the cost-to-capacity ratio in half every 18 months. In particular, the past decade has seen a dramatic increase in the power scaling of diode and fiber lasers, with the former able to squeeze 10 kilowatts from single-mode fiber in 2010 and 100 kilowatts months later. Along with conventional power, we also need to improve the technologies for combining phased array lasers.

Speed

Our ability to move quickly, moved quickly... In 1804, the first steam locomotive was invented, reaching an unprecedented speed of 110 km/h at that time. The Helios 2 spacecraft broke this record in 1976, moving away from Earth at a speed of 356,040 km/h. 40 years later, the New Horizons spacecraft reached a heliocentric velocity of almost 45 km/s or 160,000 km/h. But even at these speeds, it would take a very long time to get to Alpha Centauri, more than four light-years away.

While accelerating subatomic particles to the speed of light is commonplace in particle accelerators, this has never before been achieved by macroscopic objects. Achieving just 20% of the speed of light for Starshot would mean a 1,000-fold increase in speed for an object ever built by man.

Data storage

The basis for computing is the ability to store information. Starshot is relying on the continued decline in the cost and size of digital storage to provide sufficient storage for its programs and images captured in the Alpha Centauri system and its planets.

The cost of memory has declined exponentially for decades: in 1970, a megabyte cost about a million dollars; Now about 0.1 cents. Storage has also shrunk, from a 5-megabyte forklift-loaded hard drive in 1956 to today's available 512-gigabyte USB sticks weighing a few grams.

Connection

Once the first images are received, Starchip will send them back to Earth for processing.

Since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, telecommunications have come a long way. The average internet speed in the US today is about 11 megabits per second. The bandwidth and speed required by Starshot to send digital images over four light-years (or 20 trillion miles) will require the latest in communications technology.

One promising technology is Li-Fi, a wireless connection 100 times faster than Wi-Fi. The second is optical fibers, which now allow 1.125 terabits per second to pass through. In addition to these, there are developments in the field of quantum communications, which are not only ultra-fast, but also absolutely safe.

Data processing

The final step in the Starshot project is the analysis of the data received from the spacecraft. The bet is on an exponential increase in computing power with an increase of a trillion times over the next 60 years.

The rapid reduction in the cost of this moment is largely associated with the development of cloud computing. Looking to the future, quantum information processing methods promise a thousandfold increase in power by the time the first data from Starshot is received. These advanced processors will enable complex scientific simulations and analysis of nearby star systems.

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