Longshot Download Torrent
Charise Zelnick
Its an flyby I assume. Surprisingly light for an starship.
Not much would change in the 100 years before flyby, it would give lots of nice pictures during flyby, lots of data who would raise more questions.
If it was life at an planet we would know before it left and the pictures would give an push for an manned mission or at least robotic landers.
Even without life on any planets it would be very interesting to see alien planets up close.
Arriving at Alpha-Centauri would get you some nice data on the binary star. I don't think we have detected any planets there (I wonder how stable a planetary orbit could be around a binary star), but even if there are planets, the chances of arriving close enough to take pictures would be practically nil. There is no way you could reprogram the probe since any new commands would only be received long after it has left the system, so it would need some really sophisticated AI to pick a target and divert its course autonomously.
Arriving at Alpha-Centauri would get you some nice pictures of the binary star. I don't think we have detected any planets there (I wonder how stable a planetary orbit could be around a binary star), but even if there are planets, the chances of arriving close enough to take pictures would be practically nil. There is no way you could reprogram the probe since any new commands would only be received long after it has left the system, so it would need some really sophisticated AI to pick a target and divert its course autonomously.
It was designed to slow down, That is way better performance than I excepted.
And yes before launching this we are likely to have something far larger than the web telescope, with an starshade to make it easier to map planets.
In short we would know as much about the planets around it as we knew about Pluto before the flyby. In short we would know size, mass, atmosphere content, we would also have mapped large continents.
Without life it would be another planetary expedition, only far more exiting.
With life it would be an giant event, we would probably know about large areas covered with vegetation and perhaps if its forest like or more like grassland before but nothing else.
So that do we find: Perhaps first contact
That would change a lot of things.
While they mention the longevity of the Pioneers and Voyagers for "working with old probes", they really don't go into the issues of dealing with half-lives. They mention that He-3 is a must (no half-life issues), but dealing with the NTRs (you can use solar power once you get there, but you need to run the engine on NTRs to slow down first) is another story. Exploding the He-3 is another issue: has anybody ever done such without using a fission bomb (it sounds like the National Ignition Facility has made the most well-funded attempt and didn't come close). Storing fission bombs for a century is likely iffy tech. Either the DoE doesn't need most of the fancy new computers it has bought over the last few decades, or this is still unknown/tippy-top-secret tech (also every physicist in Iran and North Korea knows how to build a fission bomb. Building a fission bomb that can stay on the shelf for a few months was at least beyond the folks at Los Almos for nearly a decade. DoD/DoE can be expected to keep an even tighter grip on such issues than they might have in MAD days of 1987/1988).
Bit rot is going to be nasty (expect to be using 1987/1988, [or more likely 1976 RCA 1802 chips, with some nasty anti-bit-rot circuitry]). Engineers will learn a lot about n-9s design before completion.
Shock/Vibe: most mil-spec units are only expected to survive a single high-g shock event. This thing will get one per bomb (to maintain any amount of efficiency). Expect *nothing* to work as expected until *many* tests are done.
It's unclear if it is truly a trinary system, or if Proxima is a transient---but for the next long while, it's more than a binary system (Proxima is far enough out, and tiny, so it's more of a pedantic issue, like what to label Pluto).
None would launch it in 1988, it was just an case study to check the requirements.
You are right that telescopes are better use of money, however you would not get good images even with giant stuff, think an telescope of 500 meter in the outer system, yes that is optical telescope larger than any radio ones, it would take as good pictures of extrasolar planets as Hubble does of Pluto, it would also require an starshade, an free flying disc to block out the star the planet orbit around, Using multiple smaller would work but you still need lots of mirror area as you don't get many photons.
Requirements was surprisingly low for an interstellar mission, something who could be launched this century its not an megaproject. For an flyby probe laser pumped solar sail is probably better unless an flyby version of longshot could would be far smaller.
Have you looked at the difference between the Hubble and New Horizons pictures of Pluto? The laws of optics needed to focus light hasn't changed much. Being 2500 times closer will still have an advantage.
A bigger problem was that the idea wasn't a 1988 launch but a 2018 launch. Unfortunately, the biggest progress on a fusion drive is a longer list of things that don't work (my other complaints listed above would make it expensive, but certainly possible). Is the Isp of such a drive even measurable? It looks like we could do a fly-by mission with ion drives now (give it thirty years to accelerate...), but for any reasonable ship that wouldn't remotely be capable of doubling the delta-v requirements to slow down... and thus leaving it quite possible that solar-system bound telescopes *could* get a better view of the various planets/lesser stars.
So? The point is we can build spacecraft that can last for decades, it still has power, right? It can still use some of its instruments, right? If we put work into it, we could double, triple or even quadruple its lifespan using an actual nuclear reactor.
Yes, if you use a single telescope, its images would be poor - as Pluto from Hubble.
But if you are using several Hubbles at once, with a large triangulation base, coordinating them with a computer net and using computer-based statistical methods to filter out noise from the signal, that's another tale.
Afaik this is why the astronomers can study extrasolar planets even now. Sometimes even their surface details (for hot Jupiters, of course).
Requirements were surprisingly low while this design concept has not been started to be implemented by engineers - at least because
"Needless to say, including enough fusion fuel to slow an object traveling at these speeds to brake into orbit around Centauri B would require an engine far more efficient and powerful than anything envisioned for Daedalus.".
The problem is that we have little to no experience engineering for these kinds of lifespans, especially when it comes to complex electronics. The best option we do have is probably making everything redundant to a ridiculous level, relying on statistics to get the mission to become a success.
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