Tiny spaceships could explore next solar system

Physicist Stephen Hawking, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner have announced a project that could send microscopic spaceships to hunt for extraterrestrial life in the far reaches of space.

Tiny spaceships could explore next solar system

The $100m project, known as Breakthrough Starshot, will look at sending a host of tiny spacecraft far beyond our solar system to our nearest neighbour, the Alpha Centauri system.

The project aims to find out whether the nanocraft, each weighing less than 20g, could fly at a fifth of the speed of light and capture images of possible planets and other scientific data.

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