Table of Contents
Could we send a probe to Alpha Centauri?
It would take NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, which launched in 1977 and reached interstellar space in 2012, about 75,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri if the probe were headed in the right direction (which it is not). This problem becomes exponentially worse the larger a spacecraft gets.
How long would it take a probe to reach Alpha Centauri?
Then there are the Helios probes – which are the fastest spacecraft to be launched into space so far – traveling at 155,000 miles per hour (mph). However, even at that speed, it would take 18,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri.
How long would it take to get to Alpha Centauri at warp 5?
Star Trek: The Original Series
| Warp factor | Calculated speed (c) | Travel time from Earth to Alpha Centauri |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 8 | 197.69 days |
| 3 | 27 | 58.57 days |
| 4 | 64 | 24.71 days |
| 5 | 125 | 12.65 days |
Can we reach Alpha Centauri?
Alpha Centauri is 4.4 light-years away, or nearly 40 trillion kilometers. To get there in anywhere close to a human lifetime, spacecraft will need to travel a substantial fraction of light-speed—10\% would get a craft to Alpha Centauri in 44 years.
Can we get to Alpha Centauri?
Is NASA planning a mission to Alpha Centauri in 2069?
If you thought NASA was playing the long game with its plan to put people on Mars in the 2030s, you haven’t seen anything yet. New Scientist has learned that a team at the administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has started planning a mission that would send a spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri system in… 2069.
Could Breakthrough Starshot help us find life on Alpha Centauri?
But if Breakthrough Starshot succeeds, we could get snapshots of the Alpha Centauri solar system 4 light-years away — roughly the same as 6,800 trips to Pluto — 30 to 40 years from now. And maybe we’ll get a better idea about just how rare life is in the universe.
Why is it taking so long to find life on Proxima b?
The probe would look for signs of life around the potentially habitable exoplanet Proxima b, giving humanity a much better look than it could get with observation from home. So why the long wait? Simple: the technology to make this trip realistic doesn’t exist yet.
How can Breakthrough Starshot’s laser technology make interplanetary missions faster?
NASA’s New Horizons interplanetary probe weighed a bit more than a half ton, for example. Instead, Breakthrough Starshot plans to use a giant Earth-based laser array to shoot a fleet of nearly weightless spacecraft traveling much, much faster.