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posted by martyb on Wednesday December 20 2017, @11:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the say-hi-to-Vir-Cotto-for-me dept.

NASA thinks that the technologies needed to launch an interstellar probe to Alpha Centauri at a speed of up to 0.1c could be ready by 2069:

In 2069, if all goes according to plan, NASA could launch a spacecraft bound to escape our solar system and visit our next-door neighbors in space, the three-star Alpha Centauri system, according to a mission concept presented last week at the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union and reported by New Scientist. The mission, which is pegged to the 100th anniversary of the moon landing, would also involve traveling at one-tenth the speed of light.

Last year, Representative John Culberson called for NASA to launch a 2069 mission to Alpha Centauri, but it was never included in any bill.

Meanwhile, researchers have analyzed spectrographic data for the Alpha Centauri system and found that small, rocky exoplanets are almost certainly undiscovered due to current detection limits:

The researchers set up a grid system for the Alpha Centauri system and asked, based on the spectrographic analysis, "If there was a small, rocky planet in the habitable zone, would we have been able to detect it?" Often, the answer came back: "No."

Zhao, the study's first author, determined that for Alpha Centauri A, there might still be orbiting planets that are smaller than 50 Earth masses. For Alpha Centauri B there might be orbiting planets than are smaller than 8 Earth masses; for Proxima Centauri, there might be orbiting planets that are less than one-half of Earth's mass.

In addition, the study eliminated the possibility of a number of larger planets. Zhao said this takes away the possibility of Jupiter-sized planets causing asteroids that might hit or change the orbits of smaller, Earth-like planets.

(For comparison, Saturn is ~95 Earth masses, Neptune is ~17, Uranus is ~14.5, and Mars is ~0.1.)

Also at BGR and Newsweek.

Planet Detectability in the Alpha Centauri System (DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aa9bea) (DX)


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by zocalo on Wednesday December 20 2017, @01:28PM (1 child)

    by zocalo (302) on Wednesday December 20 2017, @01:28PM (#612280)

    There are babies being born today who might live long enough to see headlines about newly discovered planets in the Centauri systems.

    Assuming there are any such planets, then there are probably plenty of full-grown adults around today that will live long enough to hear about them, maybe even called Runaway1956; just because Kepler and other planet hunting projects haven't found them yet, doesn't mean they won't have by the time this probe gets there (assuming it even gets sent). Whatever instrument package a probe like this carries probably needs to be fairly heavily biased towards things that can only be done with a probe in-situ or there's a risk that it'll all be one big "Meh!" when it eventually arrives because of advances in observations we can do from right here in the Sol system while it was in transit. For comparison, NASA launched the Voyager probes fourty years ago this year so it'd be as if the data and (by modern standards) incredibly low-res images from that mission wasn't even due to start trickling in for a few more years (Jupiter in 2019, Saturn in 2020/21, Uranus in 2025, and Neptune in 2029) compared to what we can achieve with today's ground and LEO based observatories.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 20 2017, @03:50PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday December 20 2017, @03:50PM (#612335)

    You can't give the natives smallpox using a telescope. Many things require a physical presence, and even if the first mission doesn't do all the things, it will be establishing that physical presence capability.

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