NASA Planning to Launch Mission to Alpha Centauri in 2069
NASA is thinking way ahead, as a team in the agency starts putting together a mission concept for a plan to visit the star system nearest to the Solar System, centered around Alpha Centauri and its planets.
A group of engineers and scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California is working on a proposal of what could turn out to be an important interstellar mission for the agency, in 2069.
It will be just in time, too, for the one hundred year anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing if the mission launches on schedule, as the New Scientist via Digital Trends pointed out.
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It may be a daunting task, but there's a bit of support coming from the agency's funding. A 2016 budget bill directs NASA to work on interstellar travel, with a goal to have a craft capable of reaching ten percent of the speed of light or faster, by 2069.
Such a craft would make exploration of the local interstellar neighborhood feasible, although most of the technology needed to achieve that milestone does not exist yet. As such, a plan like the 2069 launch can only be prepared in outline for now.
"It's very nebulous," Anthony Freeman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory admitted. Only just one spacecraft, the Voyager 1 probe, has successfully left the solar system, and it has taken decades to do so, as The Independent points out.
Even with a craft that can reach ten percent of the speed of light, the Alpha Centauri system is 4.4 light years away. That means that even if a theoretical craft can be launched at this maximum velocity from the start, a trip to the Alpha Centauri constellation will still take at least 44 years.
A mission started in 2069, then, will only begin the exploration part of its mission in 2113.
