Concept




The Starshot concept envisions launching a "mothership" carrying about a thousand tiny spacecraft (on the scale of centimeters) to a high-altitude Earth orbit for deployment. A phased array of ground-based lasers would then focus a light beam on the crafts' sails to accelerate them one by one to the target speed within 10 minutes, with an average acceleration on the order of 100 km/s2 (10,000 ɡ), and an illumination energy on the order of 1 TJ delivered to each sail. A preliminary sail model is suggested to have a surface area of 4 m × 4 m. An October 2017 presentation of the Starshot system model examined circular sails and finds that the beam director capital cost is minimized by having a sail diameter of 5 meters.

The Earth-sized planet Proxima Centauri b is part of the Alpha Centauri system habitable zones. Ideally, the Breakthrough Starshot would aim its spacecraft within one astronomical unit (150 million kilometers or 93 million miles) of that world. From this distance, a craft's cameras could capture an image of high enough resolution to resolve surface features.

The fleet would have about 1000 spacecraft. Each one, called a StarChip, would be a very small centimeter-sized vehicle weighing a few grams. They would be propelled by a square-kilometre array of 10 kW ground-based lasers with a combined output of up to 100 GW. A swarm of about 1000 units would compensate for the losses caused by interstellar dust collisions en route to the target. In a detailed study in 2016 Thiem Hoang and coauthors found that mitigating the collisions with dust, hydrogen and galactic cosmic rays may not be as severe an engineering problem as first thought.

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Breakthrough Starshot

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