6 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science
About The chip- sized probe they are talking about sending to Alpha Centauri by lasers. How fast could it go, and would it be able to do science if it’s traveling really fast?
Comment by thunts7 at 20/07/2022 at 19:14 UTC
10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Well they were saying it could go 1/5 c I think then it would take about 20 years to get to alpha centauri. We'd need some huge lasers on the moon or spacecraft or something and the craft would have some chance of being destroyed by atoms in space. You could do some science like take pictures but everything would be blue shifted when going toward it normal side to side and red shifted moving away from your target.
This is all with the caveat that the engineering has not been done for this so who knows the actual specs of the probes