Tiny intersteller probes?

Does this seem like a practical idea:

Starshot: Russian billionaire and Stephen Hawking want to use lasers to send tiny spacecraft to nearby star

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Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and physicist Stephen Hawking have announced Breakthrough Starshot, a $100-million initiative to develop spacecraft that would send probes all the way to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system. These nano-craft would have to travel roughly a thousand times faster than current spacecraft – and would also be much smaller, consisting of a light sail and a chip that could fit in your cellphone. That’s a big job for some tiny tech.

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The Starshot initiative seeks to develop a system that could beat those odds by flying at unprecedented speeds. This means putting the technology, including the camera, not on a giant space telescope but instead on a tiny chip. That device will be attached to an ultra-lightweight light sail – a surface that uses the pressure from light particles, or photons, to propel it along.

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Because these tiny spacecraft would be so small (and much cheaper than a behemoth like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope), swarms of them could be sent out into space over time instead of just one, spreading the risk that any one of them might not make the journey. There are myriad technological challenges to be understand and overcome before making this a reality, said Harvard physicist Avi Loeb, chair of the initiative’s advisory committee. But the payoff – to be able to observe a star and its planets at a close distance, even with rudimentary tools – would be well worth it.

The first question that occurs to me is, could a probe that small send back a signal powerful enough that we could receive it at such a distance? Also there would be no way for it to slow down once it reaches its destination, and it would go hurtling right past the system. Maybe it would have time to take a few images but the window would be brief.

Still, if the price is not prohibitive, even a few up-close images might be worth it.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1VnDZtN