Back in April , a group of scientist including Stephen Hawking announced their intention to direct tiny interstellar spacecraft to our nearest wizard , Alpha Centauri , on a 20 - class voyage . The task , calledBreakthrough Starshot , has been fund to the tune of $ 100 million by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner so far .
There ’s one primal problem , though . How will the tiny spacecraft , shout out StarChips , be kept safe from radioactivity as they venture through the cosmos at one - fifth part the focal ratio of luminousness ? Well , last Wednesday , researchers from NASA and the Korean Institute of Science and Technology ( KIST ) proposed a solution in a talk at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco , led by NASA ’s Dong - Il Moon .
Breakthrough Starshot is skip to institutionalise a swarm of the spacecraft – kitted with gravid and sparse sails – to Alpha Centauri , 4.37 light - years away . They contrive to do this by firing a 100 gigawatt optical maser from Earth at the cruise , speed up the spacecraft to 20 pct of the speed of light source in minutes . Once at their destination , the spacecraft will send images and data of any planets around the star back to Earth .
It ’s certainly a grand idea , but there are a number of complications . The spacecraft will need to be able to survive journeys through interstellar dust , for instance , which could cause a lot of damage at those fastness . Communication at such a long length is also an issue , as is making trusted the space vehicle are pointed the right way of life ; even a little misalignment would leave out the star by a large distance . And then there ’s the irradiation issue .
An raiment on Earth will fire lasers at the spacecraft . Breakthrough Initiatives
Moon and his squad remember the trouble can be overcome by creating “ self - heal ” atomic number 14 chips . The gimmick would be heated using a nanowire transistor , which can mend defects due to radiation . Rather than indurate the chips , where the orchestration would be check , or trying to blame a path that define radiation sickness photograph ( and that ’s no small feat ) , they could but be repaired over and over again during the journey . The chips would power down and repair themselves every few year .
In experiments by KIST , they found they could recover flare computer storage damaged by actinotherapy 10,000 time using the technology , and DRAM could be reinstate 1 trillion times .
“ On - chip healing has been around for many , many age , ” Jin - Woo Han , a appendage of the NASA squad , toldIEEE Spectrum(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ) . The technology is predicted to become smaller and more suited for this charge in the next few years .
Of of course , there are still plenty more obstacles to overcome , not least financial support ; it ’s estimated Starshot will cost upwards of $ 10 billion . But hopefully , with more body of work like this , we can step closer to see the idea come to fruition in the approximate future .
