Feature
New Optics for Interstellar Flight
A project to fire tiny spacecraft with futuristic sails to our next-nearest star using a huge laser appears to have bitten the dust. But some scientists still see photonics as a path to interstellar travel.
Artist’s impression of Proxima Centauri b, the closest known exoplanet to Earth and a potentially life-bearing world. [ESO / M. Kornmesser]
Atop the then recently completed One World Trade Center tower in New York, USA, in April 2016, billionaire entrepreneur Yuri Milner announced that he would spend US$100 million to develop an enormous laser capable of firing gram-scale spacecraft to a fifth of the speed of light. The aim, he told the world’s press, was to reach the nearest star outside our solar system—Proxima Centauri—in just a couple of decades and beam back information about a possibly life-bearing planet orbiting the star.
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