Stephen Hawking and co-owner of Mail.ru will deliver mini-robots to Alpha Centauri

Famous British scientist Stephen Hawking and Russian businessman Yuri Milner, co-owner of Internet companies DST Global and Mail.ru Group, announced in New York about the launch of the project Breakthrough Starshot worth $ 100 million.

The goal of the mission is to deliver mini-robots to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, within 20 years. The founder of the social network Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, also joined the project’s board of directors.

Tiny nanosatellite probes will need to reach speeds of up to 160 million km / h in order to reach Alpha Centauri and send data to Earth.

“The goal of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative is to prove that a nanodevice weighing a few grams, driven by a light beam, can reach a thousand times greater speed and reach the Alpha Centauri system in 20 years,” the project says in a press release.

The nano-apparatus will consist of a miniature robot equipped with cameras, photon engines, a power unit, communications and navigation devices, as well as a light sail with a thickness of only a few hundred atoms and a mass of several grams.

Alpha Centauri is the closest to the Sun system of three stars, the distance to which is more than 40 trillion km (4,37 light years). The fastest existing spacecraft will need tens of thousands of years to fly to it.

It is expected that the research and preparation phase of the mission will take several years.

Breakthrough Starshot is the second joint project between Milner and Hawking. Last summer it was announced that the co-owner of the Internet companies DST Global and Mail.ru Group will invest $ 100 million in the search for life outside the planet earth.

As the Russian entrepreneur said, the idea is to use the most powerful telescopes combined into a large-scale computer system to search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

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