Project Breakthrough Starshot - jumping the shark?

[SystemParanoia]

Atomic12C said:

Max_Torque said:

Atomic12C said:

Breaking down a mobile phone, stripping away the casing, the screen, the keaypad, microphone, all the human interface..... its said already that the majority of the 'stuff' that does anything is not much more that a gram or two.

said by whom? i design electronics or a living, and the bare die of the processor is about 5g from a typical ARM processor. And on it's own, the bare die is pointless. What about the clock, the i/o, the power, what about radiation hardening? In fact, even bright light can cause a bare die based processor (ie non encapsulated) to reset........

And how do you make a radio transmitted with a 4 light year range that is say 0.25g and even that's a quarter of your mass budget?

sorry, but even with a jump to quantum computing it's pretty much impossible.

1g was said to be achievable by the project spokesperson on the news the other day. He used the mobile phone as an example. I can't recall the guy's name sorry.
I'm not an expert in electronics, so I'll take your word for it that at the moment it would seem an impossible target.
But with enough funding and determination I think most 'impossible' tasks find a solution.

You're talking of nano/femto tech

yes we can get processors with 14nm architecture.
but building a thing that is entirely at that scale and usable in the macro world. i dont know, i really dont

[Eric Mc]

I'm still struggling as to how these devices would send back any useful information once they had arrived at their destination.

[SystemParanoia]

I imagine that if you send a continuos stream of probes say, 1 light second apart for the enture duration of the mission, they only need to send messages as far as the next probe behind them, and basically the data will leapfrog all the way back along the chain with each probe acting as a repeater for the one in front of it.

i cant see them being able to broadcast all the way back in one shot.

and i'm skeptical of this idea ive just had about the leapfrogging data either

[annodomini2]

The real issue with the 1g goal is power.

A Sub 1g battery is going to last a few minutes, not 20 years, even with power saving.

Even if the sail was a giant solar panel, beyond Mars Solar panel effectiveness drops off sharply.

You're not going to get an RTG under 1g and certainly not one that lasts 20+years.

10Kg might be a feasible payload, bigger laser required of course!

[SystemParanoia]

Sorted!