![]() ![]() The probes, dubbed wafersats as they are essentially just small circuit boards, will be mostly made from graphite and quartz, so the team studied the effects of impacts on these materials. But Breakthrough Starshot wants to send their probes travelling at a fifth of the speed of light, meaning the kinetic energy released by even a tiny ping will be massive. Normally, a speck of dust would bounce harmlessly off a spacecraft, although slightly larger micrometeoroids are known to cause trouble for telescopes and the International Space Station. “We didn’t see any showstoppers.” Little ping, massive energy “We did a thorough analysis, taking all the relevant physics into consideration,” he says. Now Avi Loeb at Harvard University, who heads Milner’s scientific team, has completed the first of these studies, looking at the effects of collisions with the interstellar medium of dust and gas. ![]()
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