Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2019

MARCH-APRIL 2019 tems,” suggested by Breakthrough Initia- tives to accelerate so-called wafersats (mini- spacecrafts, weighing a few grams, structured as a wafer and fixed to a sail) using laser light, should be able to reach speeds close to 20% that of light − around 60,000 km/s. At this pace, a wafersat would cover the distance of a light year in as little as five Earth years. In 20-30 years, the Prox- ima Centauri and Barnard’s Star planetary systems could be reached by this method. Missions moving so fast, achievable thanks to the es- sentiality of wafersats, pay the price of not being able to carry loads and not being able to do anything more than a very fast flyby of their targets. Therefore, they are not a solution adoptable by the Genesis Project, which has other needs, including the transport of a biological mini-laboratory or, at least, a container with spores. Once close to the destination, the interstellar vehicle will also have to decelerate significantly to allow the release of the vital load into the T he illustrations on these two pages are meant to represent three fundamental episodes in the evolution of life on Earth. Below,