Astrophysicist Cosimo Bambi proposes sending a tiny spacecraft to study nearby black holes. “Earth-based lasers would blast the [light] sail with photons, accelerating the craft to a third of the speed of light.”
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Comments 1
This is one of those neat ideas which probably makes engineers laugh. This thing, with a mass of a gram, needs to survive the pretty unpleasant radiation environment that travelling that fast involves. Then it has to transmit information to us using whatever fraction-of-a-gram power source it has ... which we need to detect, from 25ly away.
If we can solve engineering challenges like that, then, well.
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