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The BBC and the Guardian both carry stories about an unmanned interstellar spacecraft designed to reach the Alpha Centauri system "within a generation" (30 or so years).
The spacecraft would be miniaturised to the size of an average silicon chip, and be propelled by a solar sail which would receive a boost from a powerful laser on the Earth.
Milner's Breakthrough Foundation is running a project, backed by Hawking, to research the technologies needed for such a mission, which they think will soon be feasible.
takyon: The campaign is called Breakthrough Starshot. Breakthrough Initiatives also announced the release of initial observational datasets from the Breakthrough Listen 10-year SETI effort.
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Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner's $100 Million Interstellar Spacecraft Plan
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday April 13 2016, @04:17AM
It doesn't necessarily need to decelerate to be useful. New Horizons zipped past Pluto and its moons, and was still able to provide plenty of data. That said, the communications link between a gram sized "spacecraft" in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri and Earth will be awful.
As for solar wind knocking them off course, the plan is to send hundreds of these cheap chips. Many may not survive.
I hope that this concept gets tested on the gas giants, because today's lasers could be used to get such tiny crafts to anywhere in the solar system within a week. Another team wants to get a 100kg craft to Mars in 3 days [soylentnews.org] (that's at least 50,000 times more mass than this proposal). They may also be able to aim them such that they enter into orbit around the gas giants, something that seems unlikely with Alpha Centauri.
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