RE: Reaching for the stars, finally - will the young ones among us get pics of Alpha C.?
April 15, 2016 at 1:14 am
The article noted the launching lasers require similar power to launching a space shuttle.
This is an appreciable percentage of the total installed electrical generating capacity of the United States. Either the lasers are spread around the country, near poser plants (unlikely since it complicates an already complicated laser system) or we build a massive set of electrical power transmission lines to the launching lasers. Pricey.
I also assume the acceleration would be done at night so we don't have to blackout the nation during that phase.
That 2 minutes is going to be a considerable challenge too, ramping up big generating plants and back down in that period is tricky, and there will be big costs involved in making that even possible let alone reliable.
As noted above, the data rate back to earth is going to be low. Very low. However, compensating for that will be the extremely brief data collection period at possible planets in the target star system. At 20% light speed, getting even a single unblurred and properly exposed photograph of, oh let's say something very similar to our moon, is going to yield a picture with only 1 or 2 pixels that will be some shade of gray. Transmitting those 2 pixels back (probably 2 10 bit bytes, and some engineering overhead) might only take a few more years (not counting the time it takes to get to earth from there).
Here's a 300X enlargement of the expected first picture returned from Proxima Centauri. Enjoy!
![[Image: th?id=OIP.M8fc64d31fa2b904aa45b010f14dc1...=300&h=300]](https://sp.yimg.com/xj/th?id=OIP.M8fc64d31fa2b904aa45b010f14dc14f5o0&pid=15.1&P=0&w=300&h=300)
This is an appreciable percentage of the total installed electrical generating capacity of the United States. Either the lasers are spread around the country, near poser plants (unlikely since it complicates an already complicated laser system) or we build a massive set of electrical power transmission lines to the launching lasers. Pricey.
I also assume the acceleration would be done at night so we don't have to blackout the nation during that phase.
That 2 minutes is going to be a considerable challenge too, ramping up big generating plants and back down in that period is tricky, and there will be big costs involved in making that even possible let alone reliable.
As noted above, the data rate back to earth is going to be low. Very low. However, compensating for that will be the extremely brief data collection period at possible planets in the target star system. At 20% light speed, getting even a single unblurred and properly exposed photograph of, oh let's say something very similar to our moon, is going to yield a picture with only 1 or 2 pixels that will be some shade of gray. Transmitting those 2 pixels back (probably 2 10 bit bytes, and some engineering overhead) might only take a few more years (not counting the time it takes to get to earth from there).
Here's a 300X enlargement of the expected first picture returned from Proxima Centauri. Enjoy!
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