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- 2039 - Starchip - - If we can accelerate a starchip to 20% the speed of light we could get to the nearest star in 20 years. It would take pictures and send them their 4.37 year journey to return to Earth. But, that’s only 25 years, a single scientific career. Thinking , planning and dreaming will lead to new innovations and explorations. So what if we don’t make it to the stars! It would be fun to try.
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- We have sent men to the Moon. Maybe soon we will send astronauts to Mars. But, will we every send space cadets to the stars?
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- Doubtful, our fastest rockets would take 30,000 years to reach the closest star, Alpha Centauri. We know there are planets there, Proxima Centauri. Even if we get there and send pictures it will take 4.37 years for the pictures to arrive back to Earth.
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- Sending a rocket there seems unrealistic at best. But, maybe we just send the camera on a small robot. Maybe the camera, radio, navigation instruments could all be put on an integrated circuit, a chip. And, we don’t use a rocket, but, propel the starchip there on a laser beam?
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- If we can accelerate the starchip to 20% the speed of light we could get there in 20 years. It will still take the pictures 4.37 years to return to Earth. But, that’s 25 years in total, a single scientific career. Might be worth doing? Some young college kid might consider it. The chance to discover another world, or, life on another planet?
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- The Starchip would need a light sail in space. Then powerful laser beams to propel it up to 20% light speed. The sail propulsion would need a large number of small lasers ganged together so their light could be focused into a single beam. The coherent beam would push a sail carrying the chip. It would take 1,000 lasers accelerating the sail up to 20% the speed of light in a few minutes.
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- The starchip would weigh only a few grams. It would contain power supplies, a light sensor, four cameras, a radio, a spectrograph, a magnetometer, and diffraction grating. Instead of heavy camera lenses , tiny diffraction grating in a planar Fourier array over a light sensor would break the incoming light into wavelengths that can be reconstructed by a computer back on Earth to any focal length.
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- We have been to the Moon but Alpha Centauri is 100 million times further away. The laser’s aim must be very precise. The transmission back would reach us with only a few hundred photons. To help improve this transmission we could set up a relay system of several starchips left along the way.
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- The chips would need batteries to run cameras, computers, and radio transmitters. Power is the hardest engineering problem to solve. Maybe tiny nuclear batteries like those used in medical implants would do the job.
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- To protect the chip from the elements encountered in space a coating of a few millimeters of beryllium copper could be used. A thousand chips should be sent because many may not survive the trip.
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- The sail must be propelled by the recoil being hit by a laser beam of light. The sail must reflect nearly all of the light, 99.999%. Any light that is not reflected will heat the sail and, that would not be good.
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- The sail would need to be very light, be only a few atoms thick, about the thickness of a soap bubble. Yet, the sail must able to withstand an acceleration of 60,000 gs. That is 60,000 the force of gravity, “gs”.
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- The sail could attach to the chip with cables, but it must be able to avoid spinning, and it must remain centered on the laser beam. It should fold up after it reaches the required speed, so it is less of a target for space dust.
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- When the sail reaches the star it needs to unfold and act an antenna, or telescope mirror.
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- To propel the sail up to speed in just a few minutes would require 100 gigawatts of power. A thousand fiber lasers grouped in an array and phased to produce a single coherent beam would do the job. It needs to be able to focus on a four square meter sail 20,000 miles away. It must hit the sail evenly or it would cause the sail to spin or tumble.
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- Most certainly the lasers would need to use adaptive optics That technology cancels out atmospheric turbulence by adjusting a flexible mirror. Or instead of a flexible mirror maybe each laser fiber could be engineered to make the corrections needed.
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- Alpha Centauri is two binary stars. Proxima is the star that is closer, and Proxima “b” is the planet that is in the right orbit to be habitable. If Starchip flew by it could take images, measure the magnetic field, maybe sample the atmosphere, all in a few minutes flyby.
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- Wow, not as easy as you first thought , right? Maybe a 15 meter space telescope would make more sense? Maybe the star chips should be better used just exploring our own solar system? That would be cheaper and quicker for sure.
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- On the other hand just thinking , planning and dreaming will lead to new innovations and explorations. So what if we don’t make it to the stars! It would be fun to try.
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- 2029 - Space, dust in outer space. Could life have started with dust from outer space. Complex organic molecules have been found in this dust. From one perspective Earth itself is just a giant dust ball; in space.
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- The Review above lists eleven other reviews written about space.
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------------------------- Tuesday, March 13, 2018 --------------------------------
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