Tuesday, 21 November 2017

Magnetic sails could put the brakes on interstellar space probes

The Breakthrough Starshot program plans to send tiny probes to Alpha Centauri, and a German physicist ...

Our nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri, is just four light-years from Earth, and while that's pretty close in the grand scheme of things, we can't just pop over to borrow some milk. With our current technology, the journey would take tens of thousands of years, but there are plans for tiny unmanned probes that could trek there in as little as 20 years. Now, a German theoretical physicist has detailed a method to use magnetic sails as a braking system, to slow craft down to a cruising speed once they get there.

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Category: Space

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