The term “moonshot” is usually invoked to denote a project so outrageously ambitious that it can only be described by comparing it to the Apollo 11 mission to land the primary human on the Moon. The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative transcends the moonshot descriptor because its purpose goes far beyond the Moon. The aptly-named project seeks to visit the closest stars.
The brainchild of Russian-born tech entrepreneur billionaire Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Starshot was announced in April 2016 at a news conference joined by renowned physicists including Hawking and Freeman Dyson. While still early, the present vision is that thousands of wafer-sized chips attached to large, silver lightsails are going to be placed into Earth orbit and accelerated by the pressure of an intense Earth-based laser hitting the lightsail.
After just two minutes of being driven by the laser, the spacecraft are going to be traveling at one-fifth the speed of light—a thousand-fold faster than any macroscopic object has ever achieved.
Each craft will coast for 20 years and collect scientific data about region . Upon reaching the planets near the Alpha Centauri star system, an the onboard camera will take high-resolution pictures and send these back to Earth, providing the primary glimpse of our closest planetary neighbors. additionally to knowledge domain , we may learn whether these planets are suitable for human colonization.
The team behind Breakthrough Starshot is as impressive because the technology. The board of directors includes Milner, Hawking, and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. the chief director is S. Pete Worden, former director of NASA Ames research facility . variety of prominent scientists, including Nobel and Breakthrough Laureates, are serving as advisors to the project, and Milner has promised $100 million of his own funds to start work. He will encourage his colleagues to contribute $10 billion over subsequent several years for its completion.
While this endeavor may sound like fantasy , there are not any known scientific obstacles to implementing it. This doesn’t mean it'll happen tomorrow: for Starshot to achieve success , variety of advances in technologies are necessary. The organizers and advising scientists are relying upon the exponential rate of advancement to form Starshot happen within 20 years.
Here are 11 key Starshot technologies and the way they're expected to advance exponentially over subsequent 20 years .
Exoplanet Detection
An exoplanet may be a planet outside our system . While the primary scientific detection of an exoplanet was only in 1988, as of May, 1 2017 there are 3,608 confirmed detections of exoplanets in 2,702 planetary systems. While some resemble those in our system , many have fascinating and bizarre features, like rings 200 times wider than Saturn’s.
The reason for this deluge of discoveries? a huge improvement in telescope technology.
Just 100 years ago the world’s largest telescope was the Hooker Telescope at 2.54 meters. Today, the ecu Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope consists of 4 large 8.2-meter diameter telescopes and is now the foremost productive ground-based facility in astronomy, with a mean of over one peer-reviewed, published scientific paper per day.
Researchers use the VLT and a special instrument to seem for rocky extrasolar planets within the habitable zone (allowing liquid water) of their host stars. In May 2016, researchers using the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile found not only one but seven Earth-sized exoplanets within the habitable zone.
Meanwhile, in space, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is meant specifically for this purpose and has already identified over 2,000 exoplanets. The James Webb Space Telescope, to be launched in October, 2018, will offer unprecedented insight into whether exoplanets can support life. “If these planets have atmospheres, [JWST] are going to be the key to unlocking their secrets,” consistent with Doug Hudgins, Exoplanet Program Scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington.
Launch Cost
The Starshot mothership are going to be launched aboard a rocket and release thousand starships. the value of transporting a payload using one-time-only rockets is immense, but private launch providers like SpaceX and Blue Origin have recently demonstrated success in reusable rockets which are expected to substantially reduce the worth . SpaceX has already reduced costs to around $60 million per Falcon 9 launch, and because the private space industry expands and reusable rockets become more common, this price is predicted to drop even further.
The Starchip
Each 15-millimeter-wide Starchip must contain a huge array of sophisticated electronic devices, like a navigation system, camera, communication laser, radioisotope battery, camera multiplexer, and camera interface. The expectation we’ll be ready to compress a whole spaceship onto alittle wafer is thanks to exponentially decreasing sensor and chip sizes.
The first computer chips within the 1960s contained a couple of transistors. because of Moore’s Law, we will now squeeze billions of transistors onto each chip. the primary camera weighed 8 pounds and took 0.01 megapixel images. Now, a camera sensor yields high-quality 12+ megapixel color images and fits during a smartphone—along with other sensors like GPS, accelerometer, and gyroscope. And we’re seeing this improvement bleed into space exploration with the arrival of smaller satellites providing better data.
For Starshot to succeed, we'll need the chip’s mass to be about 0.22 grams by 2030, but if the speed of improvement continues, projections suggest this is often entirely possible.
The Lightsail
The sail must be made from a cloth which is very reflective (to gain maximum momentum from the laser), minimally absorbing (so that it's not incinerated from the heat), and also Very light weight (allowing quick acceleration). These three criteria are extremely constrictive and there's at the present no satisfactory material.
Breakthrough-Starshot-solar-nanocraft-lightsail
Image Credit: Breakthrough Starshot
The required advances may come from AI automating and accelerating materials discovery. Such automation has advanced to the purpose where machine learning techniques can “generate libraries of candidate materials by the tens of thousands,” allowing engineers to spot which of them are worth pursuing and testing for specific applications.
Energy Storage
While the Starchip will use a small nuclear-powered radioisotope battery for its 24-year-plus journey, we'll still need conventional chemical batteries for the lasers. The lasers will got to employ tremendous energy during a short span of your time , meaning that the facility must be stored in nearby batteries.
Battery storage has improved at 5-8% per annum , though we frequently don’t notice this benefit because appliance power consumption has increased at a comparable rate leading to a gentle operating lifetime. If batteries still improve at this rate, in 20 years they ought to have 3 to five times their present capacity. Continued innovation is predicted to be driven from Tesla-Solar City’s big investment in battery technology. the businesses have already installed on the brink of 55,000 batteries in Kauai to power an outsized portion of their infrastructure.
Lasers
Thousands of high-powered lasers are going to be wont to push the lightsail to extraordinary speeds.
Lasers have obeyed Moore’s Law at an almost identical rate to integrated circuits, the cost-per-power ratio halving every 18 months. especially , the last decade has seen a dramatic acceleration in power scaling of diode and fiber lasers, the previous breaking through 10 kilowatts from one mode fiber in 2010 and therefore the 100-kilowatt barrier a couple of months later. additionally to the raw power, we'll also got to make advances in combining phased array lasers.
Speed
Our ability to maneuver quickly has…moved quickly. In 1804 the train was invented and shortly thereafter produced the hitherto unprecedented speed of 70 mph. The Helios 2 spacecraft eclipsed this record in 1976: at its fastest, Helios 2 was moving faraway from Earth at a speed of 356,040 km/h. Just 40 years later the New Horizons spacecraft achieved a heliocentric speed of just about 45 km/s or 100,000 miles per hour. Yet even at these speeds it might take an extended , while to succeed in Alpha Centauri at slightly quite four light years away.
While accelerating subatomic particles to just about speed of light is routine in particle accelerators, never before has this been achieved for macroscopic objects. Achieving 20% speed of sunshine for Starshot would represent a 1000x speed increase for any human-built object.
Memory Storage
Fundamental to computing is that the ability to store information. Starshot depends on the continued decreasing cost and size of digital memory to incorporate sufficient storage for its programs and therefore the images taken of Alpha Centauri star system and its planets.
The cost of memory has decreased exponentially for decades: in 1970, a megabyte cost about a million dollars; it’s now about one-tenth of a cent. the dimensions required for the storage has similarly decreased, from a 5-megabyte disk drive being loaded via forklift in 1956 to the present availability of 512-gigabyte USB sticks weighing a couple of grams.
Telecommunication
Once the pictures are taken the Starchip will send the pictures back to Earth for processing.
Telecommunications has advanced rapidly since Alexander Graham Bell invented the phonephone in 1876. the typical internet speed within the US is currently about 11 megabits per second. The bandwidth and speed required for Starshot to send digital images over 4 light years—or 20 trillion miles—will require taking advantage within the latest telecommunications technology.
One promising technology is Li-Fi, a wireless approach which is 100 times faster than Wi-Fi. A second is via optical fibers which now boast 1.125 terabits per second. There are even efforts in quantum telecommunications which aren't just ultrafast but completely secure.
Computation
The final step within the Starshot project is to research the info coming back from the spacecraft. to try to to so we must cash in of the exponential increase in computing power, taking advantage of the trillion-fold increase in computing over the 60 years.
This dramatically decreasing cost of computing has now continued due largely to the presence of cloud computing. Extrapolating into the longer term and taking advantage of latest sorts of processing, like quantum computing, we should always see another thousand-fold increase in power by the time data from Starshot returns. Such extreme processing power will allow us to perform sophisticated scientific modeling and analysis of our nearest neighboring star system.
Acknowledgements: The author would really like to thank Pete Worden and Gregg Maryniak for suggestions and comments.
The brainchild of Russian-born tech entrepreneur billionaire Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Starshot was announced in April 2016 at a news conference joined by renowned physicists including Hawking and Freeman Dyson. While still early, the present vision is that thousands of wafer-sized chips attached to large, silver lightsails are going to be placed into Earth orbit and accelerated by the pressure of an intense Earth-based laser hitting the lightsail.
After just two minutes of being driven by the laser, the spacecraft are going to be traveling at one-fifth the speed of light—a thousand-fold faster than any macroscopic object has ever achieved.
Each craft will coast for 20 years and collect scientific data about region . Upon reaching the planets near the Alpha Centauri star system, an the onboard camera will take high-resolution pictures and send these back to Earth, providing the primary glimpse of our closest planetary neighbors. additionally to knowledge domain , we may learn whether these planets are suitable for human colonization.
The team behind Breakthrough Starshot is as impressive because the technology. The board of directors includes Milner, Hawking, and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. the chief director is S. Pete Worden, former director of NASA Ames research facility . variety of prominent scientists, including Nobel and Breakthrough Laureates, are serving as advisors to the project, and Milner has promised $100 million of his own funds to start work. He will encourage his colleagues to contribute $10 billion over subsequent several years for its completion.
While this endeavor may sound like fantasy , there are not any known scientific obstacles to implementing it. This doesn’t mean it'll happen tomorrow: for Starshot to achieve success , variety of advances in technologies are necessary. The organizers and advising scientists are relying upon the exponential rate of advancement to form Starshot happen within 20 years.
Here are 11 key Starshot technologies and the way they're expected to advance exponentially over subsequent 20 years .
Exoplanet Detection
An exoplanet may be a planet outside our system . While the primary scientific detection of an exoplanet was only in 1988, as of May, 1 2017 there are 3,608 confirmed detections of exoplanets in 2,702 planetary systems. While some resemble those in our system , many have fascinating and bizarre features, like rings 200 times wider than Saturn’s.
The reason for this deluge of discoveries? a huge improvement in telescope technology.
Just 100 years ago the world’s largest telescope was the Hooker Telescope at 2.54 meters. Today, the ecu Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope consists of 4 large 8.2-meter diameter telescopes and is now the foremost productive ground-based facility in astronomy, with a mean of over one peer-reviewed, published scientific paper per day.
Researchers use the VLT and a special instrument to seem for rocky extrasolar planets within the habitable zone (allowing liquid water) of their host stars. In May 2016, researchers using the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile found not only one but seven Earth-sized exoplanets within the habitable zone.
Meanwhile, in space, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is meant specifically for this purpose and has already identified over 2,000 exoplanets. The James Webb Space Telescope, to be launched in October, 2018, will offer unprecedented insight into whether exoplanets can support life. “If these planets have atmospheres, [JWST] are going to be the key to unlocking their secrets,” consistent with Doug Hudgins, Exoplanet Program Scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington.
Launch Cost
The Starshot mothership are going to be launched aboard a rocket and release thousand starships. the value of transporting a payload using one-time-only rockets is immense, but private launch providers like SpaceX and Blue Origin have recently demonstrated success in reusable rockets which are expected to substantially reduce the worth . SpaceX has already reduced costs to around $60 million per Falcon 9 launch, and because the private space industry expands and reusable rockets become more common, this price is predicted to drop even further.
The Starchip
Each 15-millimeter-wide Starchip must contain a huge array of sophisticated electronic devices, like a navigation system, camera, communication laser, radioisotope battery, camera multiplexer, and camera interface. The expectation we’ll be ready to compress a whole spaceship onto alittle wafer is thanks to exponentially decreasing sensor and chip sizes.
The first computer chips within the 1960s contained a couple of transistors. because of Moore’s Law, we will now squeeze billions of transistors onto each chip. the primary camera weighed 8 pounds and took 0.01 megapixel images. Now, a camera sensor yields high-quality 12+ megapixel color images and fits during a smartphone—along with other sensors like GPS, accelerometer, and gyroscope. And we’re seeing this improvement bleed into space exploration with the arrival of smaller satellites providing better data.
For Starshot to succeed, we'll need the chip’s mass to be about 0.22 grams by 2030, but if the speed of improvement continues, projections suggest this is often entirely possible.
The Lightsail
The sail must be made from a cloth which is very reflective (to gain maximum momentum from the laser), minimally absorbing (so that it's not incinerated from the heat), and also Very light weight (allowing quick acceleration). These three criteria are extremely constrictive and there's at the present no satisfactory material.
Breakthrough-Starshot-solar-nanocraft-lightsail
Image Credit: Breakthrough Starshot
The required advances may come from AI automating and accelerating materials discovery. Such automation has advanced to the purpose where machine learning techniques can “generate libraries of candidate materials by the tens of thousands,” allowing engineers to spot which of them are worth pursuing and testing for specific applications.
Energy Storage
While the Starchip will use a small nuclear-powered radioisotope battery for its 24-year-plus journey, we'll still need conventional chemical batteries for the lasers. The lasers will got to employ tremendous energy during a short span of your time , meaning that the facility must be stored in nearby batteries.
Battery storage has improved at 5-8% per annum , though we frequently don’t notice this benefit because appliance power consumption has increased at a comparable rate leading to a gentle operating lifetime. If batteries still improve at this rate, in 20 years they ought to have 3 to five times their present capacity. Continued innovation is predicted to be driven from Tesla-Solar City’s big investment in battery technology. the businesses have already installed on the brink of 55,000 batteries in Kauai to power an outsized portion of their infrastructure.
Lasers
Thousands of high-powered lasers are going to be wont to push the lightsail to extraordinary speeds.
Lasers have obeyed Moore’s Law at an almost identical rate to integrated circuits, the cost-per-power ratio halving every 18 months. especially , the last decade has seen a dramatic acceleration in power scaling of diode and fiber lasers, the previous breaking through 10 kilowatts from one mode fiber in 2010 and therefore the 100-kilowatt barrier a couple of months later. additionally to the raw power, we'll also got to make advances in combining phased array lasers.
Speed
Our ability to maneuver quickly has…moved quickly. In 1804 the train was invented and shortly thereafter produced the hitherto unprecedented speed of 70 mph. The Helios 2 spacecraft eclipsed this record in 1976: at its fastest, Helios 2 was moving faraway from Earth at a speed of 356,040 km/h. Just 40 years later the New Horizons spacecraft achieved a heliocentric speed of just about 45 km/s or 100,000 miles per hour. Yet even at these speeds it might take an extended , while to succeed in Alpha Centauri at slightly quite four light years away.
While accelerating subatomic particles to just about speed of light is routine in particle accelerators, never before has this been achieved for macroscopic objects. Achieving 20% speed of sunshine for Starshot would represent a 1000x speed increase for any human-built object.
Memory Storage
Fundamental to computing is that the ability to store information. Starshot depends on the continued decreasing cost and size of digital memory to incorporate sufficient storage for its programs and therefore the images taken of Alpha Centauri star system and its planets.
The cost of memory has decreased exponentially for decades: in 1970, a megabyte cost about a million dollars; it’s now about one-tenth of a cent. the dimensions required for the storage has similarly decreased, from a 5-megabyte disk drive being loaded via forklift in 1956 to the present availability of 512-gigabyte USB sticks weighing a couple of grams.
Telecommunication
Once the pictures are taken the Starchip will send the pictures back to Earth for processing.
Telecommunications has advanced rapidly since Alexander Graham Bell invented the phonephone in 1876. the typical internet speed within the US is currently about 11 megabits per second. The bandwidth and speed required for Starshot to send digital images over 4 light years—or 20 trillion miles—will require taking advantage within the latest telecommunications technology.
One promising technology is Li-Fi, a wireless approach which is 100 times faster than Wi-Fi. A second is via optical fibers which now boast 1.125 terabits per second. There are even efforts in quantum telecommunications which aren't just ultrafast but completely secure.
Computation
The final step within the Starshot project is to research the info coming back from the spacecraft. to try to to so we must cash in of the exponential increase in computing power, taking advantage of the trillion-fold increase in computing over the 60 years.
This dramatically decreasing cost of computing has now continued due largely to the presence of cloud computing. Extrapolating into the longer term and taking advantage of latest sorts of processing, like quantum computing, we should always see another thousand-fold increase in power by the time data from Starshot returns. Such extreme processing power will allow us to perform sophisticated scientific modeling and analysis of our nearest neighboring star system.
Acknowledgements: The author would really like to thank Pete Worden and Gregg Maryniak for suggestions and comments.
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