Blåhaj PieFed
[Eric Berger] Private group wants to launch "cheapest possible" mission to Alpha Centauri
Key points:
On Tuesday, Johnston and a handful of other entrepreneurs announced the “Fermi Explorer” mission. In concept, it is simple. They seek to raise $15 million to build a small spacecraft, carrying a 1 kg payload, and launch it to Alpha Centauri such that it reaches that system in fewer than 80,000 years.
The main stumbling block involves getting the probe—essentially a large tank of Xenon gas and some solar panels for solar-electric propulsion, and a few small scientific payloads—moving fast enough
after launching into low-Earth orbit on a rideshare mission, the spacecraft would fly retrograde arcs to decrease its distance from the Sun at perihelion from 1 astronomical unit (Earth-Sun distance) to 0.42 astronomical units. At these close approaches to the Sun, taking advantage of the higher solar flux as well as the Oberth effect, the spacecraft would operate its propulsion system to increase its velocity with “perihelion pump” maneuvers.
It would achieve an escape trajectory after about 12 years, at a velocity of about 25 km/s, or about 55,000 miles per hour. At this speed, the Fermi Explorer could reach Alpha Centauri within about 77,000 years, flying on a ballistic coast.
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Still far too slow. Let’s wait for some technology improvements.
There’s no way any of the technology we have ever built would last long enough to make it there. To even get anywhere close to that we’d have to build redundancies on top of redundancies on top of redundancies
Edit: With that said, I would like to see some exploration of using more consumer level equipment in space. The Mars helicopter proved that a Snapdragon 810 chip could be used on Mars, even with the higher amount of radiation, and I know that radiation can cause bit flips, which can cause computer errors, but if it would be cheaper to put multiple computing chips in a device instead of hardening one computer chip, it may be worth it. As long as you’ve got the power budget for it, you could say have three separate chips doing the same calculations on the same data and two of them have to agree in order to perform an action. That way if there’s a bit flip in one, the others will still be fine.
Edit 2: Oh, I see. After reading the article, the point isn’t really to actually get the spacecraft there in an operating condition. The point is to get a probe that we have on a trajectory towards another star to knock down one of the filters of the Fermi Paradox about intelligent species going extinct before they can send out probes.
Edit 3: The speed at which it would travel is about 43% faster than the Voyager 1 spacecraft. And I believe the Voyager spacecraft holds the record for the fastest object humans have ever made.
Edit 4: I stand corrected. I forgot about Parker Solar Probe, which is traveling at 430,000 MPH.
Depending on circumstances you could repeat the same calculation on the same chip, if the flipping bit isn’t in your program counter or similar lol
Given the flips are pretty much exclusively 0 -> 1 you can at least predict where they might happen. And they probably aren’t happening in RAM if you’re using ECC memory
Depending on how long you want the spacecraft to be functional, though, you’ll definitely want multiple redundant computing systems. That way, when one eventually fails, another one can pick up from it. I can’t remember how many computers the Voyager spacecraft have, but they’ve been operating for, what, 40-plus years?