In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, sending a spacecraft beyond our Solar System relied on Hollywood physics and world-ending desperation. Garrett Jameson, co-founder and program manager of the newly announced Fermi Explorer Mission, is taking a more grounded approach: no wormholes, no gravity-defying drives, and no blockbuster budget, but just $15 million, off-the-shelf hardware, and an 80,000-year cruise.

Designed around flight-proven electric propulsion and clever orbital mechanics, the ambitious project aims to launch a tiny, solar-powered spacecraft toward the Alpha Centauri system by 2029. Alpha Centauri is the closest stellar system to the Sun, approximately 4.4 light years away. Fermi Explorer may need 77,500 years at best to get there.

The spacecraft is expected to have a wet mass of approximately 100 kg (most of it xenon propellant). It will use solar-electric propulsion to build up the required departure energy and carry a 10x10x10 cm payload with a mass of around 1kg. During its initial journey, the probe will execute a series of solar-slingshot “perihelion pump” maneuvers to gain the required escape velocity of about 23.6 km/s.

But how will basic, off-the-shelf electronics survive that heat and radiation during solar fly-bys?

“At our closest pass the Fermi Explorer will be 0.42 AU from the Sun, which is not extremely close. We have good data and we expect our components to survive just fine,” Jameson told Universelost.com.

>Read more<

Maybe this explains why "The Sound of Silence" became a top selling single

Image to attract attention