Nasa and Stephen Hawking to launch a 'self-healing' craft to reach habitable planet in 20 years

[Easy Rhino]

Breakthrough Starshot has successfully launched its first spacecraft, marking a major milestone for interstellar exploration and the search for life beyond our solar system.

The ‘Sprites,’ are the smallest fully functional space probes ever made, with each built on a single circuit board measuring just 1.4-by-1.4 inches (3.5-by-3.5cm).

With the launch of the prototype Sprites, the initiative has brought spacecraft miniaturization closer to reality, and, in turn, its ultimate goal of sending a fleet of tiny, light-propelled ‘StarChips’ to our closest stellar neighbour, Alpha Centau

Small enough that you could just throw it into space

 

[infrared]

That starchip looks like one of my homebrew gadgets...
I'm wondering if it has enough horsepower to transmit anything from LEO?
It's basically powered by a single off-the-shelf CC430 microcontroller, which is basically an MSP430 and CC1120 in one package.
I know that CC1120 can do up to 100km with an amp in direct line of sight, but I'm not sure it can do 1000+km through ionosphere.
Sounds fishy.

Maybe that's what they plan to do, receive the signal from one of our satellites and re-transmit it back down to earth?

Whatever they do I think this is a really cool project, can't wait to see what they do with it

 

[the54thvoid]

Maybe that's what they plan to do, receive the signal from one of our satellites and re-transmit it back down to earth?

Whatever they do I think this is a really cool project, can't wait to see what they do with it

You've seen the original Star Trek the motion picture right? It'll be like V'Ger but cuter.