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New Delhi, Dec 20: NASA in the quest of life outside the solar system is planning an interstellar mission to the three-star Alpha Centauri system. Even though the mission has not been named and the technology required for getting a craft there does not exist yet, it has been decided that launch date would coincide with the 100th anniversary of the first moon landing. The mission requires a craft that would have to travel at a minimum of 10 per cent of the speed of light.
Even if a record-breaking tenth of the speed of light is achieved, the Alpha Centauri constellation which is 4.4 light years away would still be a 44-year trip. The nearest neighbour could be reached only by 2113.
“It’s very nebulous,” Anthony Freeman, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), told the New Scientist.
NASA is also considering sending tiny probes powered by lasers which in theory may be able to reach a quarter of the speed of light. Other techniques that are being considered are harnessing nuclear reactions, or through collisions between antimatter and matter.
Voyager 1 craft, launched in 1977 is the only spacecraft that has successfully gone out of our solar system so far. The spacecraft has provided astonishing new insights into the planets and moons within our own solar system, inspite of the limitations in the technology it is equipped with. It is currently 11.7 billion miles from Earth, and is trundling along at less than 1 per cent of the speed of light.
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