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Old 13-04-2016, 02:55 PM
julianh72 (Julian)
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Join Date: Jan 2014
Location: Kelvin Grove
Posts: 1,301
Take a look a the actual Breakthrough Starshot website http://breakthroughinitiatives.org/Challenges/3 to get an understanding of the team's assessment of the challenges, including:

. Building a 100 giga-watt laser array (and designing a sail which can cop a blast from a 100 giga-watt laser array!)
. Gram-scale chip(s) for the laser comms, processors, cameras, nuclear power source, etc
. Pointing the (gram-scale) cameras for a planetary fly-by at 0.2 c
. Using the sail as a "Fresnel lens" for comms back to Earth
. Building a kilometre-scale receiving array to pick up the very weak signal from the spacecraft
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