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3SquirrelsinaCoat t1_jd7jwbe wrote

Reply to comment by Kal-El_Skywalker1998 in A New Mission Will Search for Habitable Planets at Alpha Centauri by Aeromarine_eng

The light sail carrying a wafer-thin sensor package is not meant to come back. One of the biggest challenges is figuring out how to slow it down as it approaches AC. What will most likely happen is the probe just zips through the system, grabs whatever data it can, and sends it back to Earth before flying on into nothingness. The alternative - slowing it down, redirecting it back toward Earth with orbital maneuvers, speeding it back up, and then having it actually reach us (not just zip through our system) - technically, we're not even close to that as a spacefaring species.

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magnabosco t1_jd7s4v9 wrote

If you sent several in a chain, the probes could transfer the data back to each other, eventually coming back to earth, no?

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3SquirrelsinaCoat t1_jd7uak6 wrote

Sending data back is the point, and I don't think you need a chain to accomplish that - just make sure the antenna is pointed in the right direction. The person above me seemed to suggest that the probe itself will be brought back, and that's not so. But the data, definitely.

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Representative_Pop_8 t1_jd7wmdp wrote

I think the plan is to send a chain, reason is that the v prices would be too small to power any type of transmitter that could reliably reach earth, so you use the train to relay. also redundancy since space v dust could damage some probes

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valetofficial t1_jdaby07 wrote

You might as well just make von Neumann probes at that point.

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