Yuri Milner breakthrough mission to Alpha Centauri Options

[Guest_mcmcmc_*]

https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/about

Laser-powered nanocrafts headed to Alpha Centauri:

Breakthrough Starshot is a $100 million research and engineering program aiming to demonstrate proof of concept for a new technology, enabling ultra-light unmanned space flight at 20% of the speed of light; and to lay the foundations for a flyby mission to Alpha Centauri within a generation.

Which are the engineering challenges?
http://breakthroughinitiatives.org/challenges/3

Yuri Milner twitter feed (official?): https://twitter.com/yurimilner

[JRehling]

It seems like Eris and Sedna would be a nice intermediary case to test on before leaping all the way to Alpha Centauri.

The biological inspiration of insect (etc.) swarms is interesting for many domains, but the problem of long-distance information transmission is probably much, harder to scale than the physical exploration itself. I suppose that the one approach would be to use optical transmission and count on big light-bucket telescopes to be created while the nanocraft are in flight, but then you'd have to resolve them vs. the Alpha Centauri stars; maybe a hyperbolic trajectory would fling them off to the side eventually, but that would postpone and worsen the distance problem.

I'd be very enthusiastic about seeing this developed and tested for Eris, etc. first. That solves/reduces the magnitudes of several key variables a LOT.