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| Hawking, Milner & Zuckerberg to send tiny craft to another star system at near-light speed | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Russian businessman Yury Milner joined forces with Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg to launch the Breakthrough Starshot project, aiming to send a robot to Alpha Centauri in the next 20 years. | Russian businessman Yury Milner joined forces with Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg to launch the Breakthrough Starshot project, aiming to send a robot to Alpha Centauri in the next 20 years. |
| The announcement comes on the day of the 55th anniversary of the first manned space flight. | |
| The joint initiative by the well-known Russian Internet investor, the English physicist and the American Facebook co-founder will cost $100 million, RIA Novosti reported on Tuesday. | |
| The automated probe is being sent to Alpha Centauri, and is expected to reach it in 20 years. Called a "nano-craft" due to only weighing a gram, it will be sent 25 trillion miles – or 4.37 light years – by beam of light. | |
| The fastest currently existing spacecraft would take some 30,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri. | |
| Pushed by multiple lasers combined into a single powerful beam, the craft will be able to reach a speed of 20 percent of the speed of light. | |
| Yuri Milner explained that one of the main principles behind the Breakthrough Starshot project is multiple redundancies. The plan is to create ‘hundreds, perhaps even thousands’ of the tiny probes. | |
| Introducing the project, Professor Stephen Hawking said that it would be a significant transcendence of current human limitations. "The limit that confronts us now is the great void between us and the stars but now we can transcend it, with light beams and light sales and the lightest spacecraft ever built we can launch a mission to Alpha Centauri within a generation,” Hawking said. | |
| "Today we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos, because we are human and our nature is to fly," he concluded. | |
| DETAILS TO FOLLOW | DETAILS TO FOLLOW |