Billionaire Internet investor Yuri Milner announced another $100 million initiative on Tuesday to better understand the cosmos, this time by deploying thousands of tiny spacecraft to travel to our nearest neighbouring star system and send back pictures.
If successful, scientists could determine if Alpha Centauri, a star system about 25 trillion miles away, contains an Earth-like planet capable of sustaining life.
What is Alpha Centauri?
The Proxima Centauri, Aplha Centauri and Beta Centauri form a system of stars which are the closest to the Earth.
While Proxima as its name suggests is the closest which is about 4.22 light years away but is also the least bright among the three. Aplha and Beta together are a binary system and Proxima is bound to them gravitationally which means the Alpha and Beta actually orbit around a point between them and are 4.35 light years away from Earth.
The Alpha Centauri can not be seen from most of the Northern hemisphere however it is always visible during night from places below the Earth's 29th parallel.
The catch? It could take years to develop the project, dubbed Breakthrough Starshot, and there is no guarantee it will work.
Tuesday's announcement, made with cosmologist Stephen Hawking, comes less than a year after the announcement of Breakthrough Listen. That decade-long, $100 million project, also backed by Milner, monitors radio signals for signs of intelligent life across the universe.
Why Alpha Centauri?
According to a report in Popular Science, Aplha Centauri might just be one of the places in the Universe that might have plants like Earth that may support life. And because Alpha is the closest to Earth after the Sun it could be the first step to discovering a fascinating new system of plants and thus bringing man closer to finding extraterrestrial life.
So while the search for life in our solar system continues, looking beyond it, Aplha Centauri might just be Yuri Milner's best option. And his next project Breakthrough Starshot plans to do just that.
Breakthrough Starshot involves deploying small light-propelled vehicles to carry equipment like cameras and communication equipment. Scientists hope the vehicles, known as nanocraft, will eventually fly at 20 percent of the speed of light, more than a thousand times faster than today's spacecraft.
He envisions sending a larger conventional spacecraft containing thousands of nanocraft into orbit, and then launching the nanocraft one by one, he said in an interview.
The idea has precedents with mixed results.
Two years ago, Cornell University's KickSat fizzled after the craft carrying 104 micro-satellites into space failed to release them. The plan was to let the tiny satellites orbit and collect data for a few weeks.
Worden acknowledges challenges, including the nanocraft surviving impact on launch. They would then endure 20 years of travel through the punishing environment of interstellar space, with obstacles such as dust collisions.
Yuri Milner
A onetime physics PhD student in Moscow who dropped out to move to the United States in 1990, Milner is one of a handful of technology tycoons devoting time and money to space exploration. He is known for savvy investments, including in social network Facebook Inc and Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi.
"The problems remaining to be solved - any one of them are showstoppers," Worden said.
Governments likely would not take on the research due to its speculative nature, he said, yet the technology is promising enough to merit pursuing.
If the nanocraft reach the star system and succeed in taking photographs, it would take about another four years to transmit them back to Earth.
(With inputs from Reuters)
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