Breakthrough Starshot

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The goal: Alpha Centauri and its position in the starry sky

Breakthrough Starshot (German 'breakthrough star shot') is a research and development project of the Breakthrough Initiatives and pursues the project goal of the proof of concept of an unmanned interstellar space mission . It will initially be financed with $ 100 million from the Russian-born American Internet billionaire Juri Milner .

The aim of the project is specifically to prove that it is possible to accelerate small space missiles with light sails to a fifth of the speed of light using very strong laser light and thus first reach Alpha Centauri (the star system closest to the sun ), determine data there and send it back to earth . The initiators hope, if the project is expected to be feasible, that it will actually be implemented as an international research project, at a cost similar to that for the largest international research projects to date (e.g. CERN ). They estimate the development time to be 20 years, the travel time to 20 years plus the necessary time for the radio signals back to earth.

The project was announced on April 12, 2016 by financier Juri Milner and British theoretical physicist and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking . Ann Druyan , Freeman Dyson , Mae Jemison , Avi Loeb and Pete Worden also attended the presentation at the One World Observatory at One World Trade Center in New York .

People involved

In Board (governing body) of the project are Yuri Milner and Facebook - CEO Mark Zuckerberg . Even Stephen Hawking was a member of this committee.

The Executive Director of Breakthrough Starshot and responsible for the practical implementation of the project is Pete Worden , the former head of the NASA AMES Research Center .

The chair of the Breakthrough Starshot Advisory Committee is the astrophysicist and cosmologist Avi Loeb , professor of theoretical physics at Harvard University .

Members of this advisory body include the astrophysicist Bruce T. Draine ( Princeton University ), the French astronomer Olivier Guyon , the astrophysicist and Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter ( Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California , Berkeley ), the former astronaut and head of the 100th Year Starship project Mae Jemison , science fiction writer and scientist Geoffrey A. Landis, and plasma physicist and former director of the Space Research Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR Roald Sagdejew .

The concept was designed by Philip Lubin .

Technical requirements

Robert Forward had already shown in the 1970s that laser beams can accelerate a spaceship by means of light sails . However, in order to achieve the speed of 60,000 km / s required for the project, the camera and radio transmitter as well as the energy supply for both devices and finally the light sail must weigh only one or a few grams and also have to cope with the acceleration of several 10,000 g . The second requirement is to combine a large number of lasers into a 100 gigawatt beam and to focus them on the small area of ​​the light sail during the acceleration phase.

Individual aspects and required components have already been examined in other contexts before the start of the project, as follows:

  • Photon propulsion, especially with laser
  • Micro cameras
  • Miniature calculator and control software
  • Miniature batteries
  • Protective jacket for nanosatellites, for example made of beryllium copper
  • Light sails and high radiated energy, more recent works deal with the shaping of the sails

Details of the concept

During the development period, a kind of miniature spaceship the size of an electronic microchip ( English “starchip” ) will be developed. This should only consist of a coated wafer with the electronics, i.e. control computer, energy source, camera, receiver, transmitter and a sun sail for movement. The light sail should be a few meters tall but only a few layers of atoms thick. It is to be driven with a strong laser beam that irradiates the solar sail for 10 minutes over a distance of 2 million kilometers. So that the sail absorbs as little of the light as possible and experiences the highest possible acceleration in the direction of the beam through reflection , it must be highly reflective .

Web links

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Starshot. Breakthrough Initiatives, accessed April 13, 2016 .
  2. ↑ a b Breakthrough Starshot ( Memento of the original from April 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Live stream recorded from the performance on April 12, 2016, the 55th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first flight into space , on livestream.com on April 12, 2016; accessed on April 14, 2016  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / livestream.com
  3. ↑ Fleet of mini spaceships to fly to Alpha Centauri. sueddeutsche.de, accessed on April 16, 2016
  4. ↑ a b Leaders - Management and Advisory Committee. Breakthrough Initiatives, accessed April 18, 2016
  5. ↑ DEEP-IN: Directed Energy Interstellar Precursors. (No longer available online.) UCSB Experimental Cosmology Group, University of California , archived from the original on April 12, 2016 ; accessed on April 12, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.deepspace.ucsb.edu
  6. ↑ Starchip enterprise. The Economist , April 16, 2016, accessed April 18, 2016 .
  7. ↑ a b c J. A. Atchison, MA Peck: A passive, sun-pointing, millimeter-scale solar sail , Acta Astronautica , Vol. 67, pp. 108-121 (2010)
  8. ^ A b c Z. Manchester, MA Peck, A. Filo .: KickSat: A Crowd-Funded Mission to Demonstrate the World's Smallest Spacecraft. In: Proceedings of the AIAA / USU Conference on Small Satellites (2013). Archived from the original on April 26, 2016 ; accessed on August 30, 2018 .
  9. ↑ a b c D. J. Barnhart, T. Vladimirova, MN Sweeting: Very-small-satellite design for distributed space missions , Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets , Vol. 44, pp. 1294-1306 (2007), doi : 10.2514 / 1.28678
  10. ↑ a b c D. J. Barnhart, T. Vladimirova, MN Sweeting: A low-cost femtosatellite to enable distributed space missions , Acta Astronautica, Vol. 64, pp. 1123–1143 (2009), doi : 10.2514 / 6.IAC-06 -B5.6.06
  11. ^ PR Gill, C. Lee, DG Lee, A. Wang, A. Wolnar: A microscale camera using direct fourier-domain scene capture , Opt. Lett., Vol. 36, no. 15, pp. 2949-2951 (2011), doi : 10.1364 / OL.36.002949
  12. ↑ PR Gill, C. Lee, S. Sivaramakrishnana, A. Molnar: Robustness of Planar Fourier Capture Arrays to Color Changes and Lost Pixels , Journal of Instrumentation, Vol. 7, no.1 (2012), doi : 10.1088 / 1748- 0221/7/01 / C01061 , arxiv : 1111.4524
  13. ↑ CJ Etting et al .: Demonstration of a radiation resistant, high efficiency SiC betavoltaic , Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 88 no.6 (2006), doi : 10.1063 / 1.2172411
  14. ↑ MVS Chandrashekhar, CI Thomas, H. Li, MG Spencer, A. Lal: Demonstration of a 4H SiC betavoltaic cell , Applied Physics Letters , Vol. 88, no. 3, pp. 1351-1354 (2006), doi : 10.1063 /1.2166699
  15. ↑ P. Huang et al .: On-chip and freestanding elastic carbon films for micro-supercapacitors , Science , Vol. 351, no. 6274, pp. 691–695 (2016), doi : 10.1126 / science.aad3345
  16. ^ Colin R. McInnes: Solar Sailing: Technology, Dynamics, and Mission Applications. 2004, ISBN 978-3540210627
  17. ↑ C.-W. Hsu et al .: Observation of Trapped Light Within The Radiation Continuum , ( Memento of the original from February 14, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Nature, Vol. 499, pp. 188-191 (2013), doi : 10.1038 / nature12289 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / scholar.harvard.edu
  18. ↑ B. Slovick, Z. Gang Yu, M. Berding, S. Krishnamurthy: Perfect Dielectric metamaterial Reflector , Physical Review B, Vol 88, pp 165116-1 - 165116-7 (2013). Doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevB .88.165116
  19. ↑ Jan Osterkamp: Round laser sails for a fantastic Alpha Centauri mission. Spektrum.de, October 11, 2016, accessed on October 12, 2016 .
  20. ↑ Martin Holland: "Starshot": Nano spaceships should race to Alpha Centauri in 20 years. In: heise online . April 12, 2016. Retrieved April 12, 2016 .
  21. ↑ Starshot Initiative Aimed At Interstellar 'Nanocraft' aviationweek.com, accessed April 15, 2016
  22. ↑ Jesse Emspak: No Breakthrough Yet: Stephen Hawking's Interstellar 'Starshot' Faces Challenges. space.com, April 15, 2016, accessed April 18, 2016 : “ You're pumping a lot of energy into this object. You'd better hope 99.9 percent of it gets reflected. That's because, when an object absorbs energy from light, the object re-emits that light at a longer wavelength (which is why things warm up in the sun). If too much energy is absorbed by a Starshot sail, it could very well melt… " (" You are pumping a lot of energy into this object [i.e. the sail of the Starshot probe]. You better hope that 99.9% [des Laser beam]. Because when an object absorbs light energy, it emits it again at a longer wavelength (which is why things heat up in sunlight). If a Starshot sail absorbs too much energy, it will very likely melt ... "). Jonathan McDowell, scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.