Tom Metcalfe reports that astronomers recently announced strong evidence of an Earth-like alien planet around Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our sun, making it the closest exoplanet found to date. Though the star system is our cosmic neighbor, it is still located 4.2 light-years, or 25 trillion miles, away from Earth. At such distances, could we ever visit the newfound planet?
Even the nearest stars would takes tens of thousands of years to reach using conventional spacecraft, such as the robotic probes being used now to explore the solar system. These spacecraft are driven by a combination of chemical rockets, low-thrust ion drives and gravity-assisted trajectories, including so-called slingshot maneuvers around the sun or large planets that give them a big burst of speed.
But if we are going to travel beyond our solar system, we are going to need something a little faster than that, perhaps something like the giant Project Daedalus fusion rocket, very large when compared to the size of the NASA Saturn V rocket. Seven ways are being considered where robots, or even human explorers, could visit the Proxima Centauri system or other cosmic neighborhoods.
Project Daedalus is a concept design for an interstellar probe, developed in the 1970s by a group of technical specialists for the British Interplanetary Society. The target destination was Barnard Star, a red dwarf about 6 light-years away, in many ways similar to Proxima Centauri, where astronomers now report they have found signs of a potentially habitable planet. When Project Daedalus was conceived, some astronomers thought a gas giant planet might be in orbit around Barnard Star, but since then, no planets have been found in the star system.
The result of the five-year project was the design of the Daedalus spacecraft, a two-stage, 54,000-ton nuclear rocket that would boost a 400-ton robotic probe to around 12% of the speed of light.
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