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Project Daedalus
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| Psygnosis |
Space Exploration never ceases to amaze me, i was reading something the other day which was talking about a spacecraft being made practically the same size as the Empire State building in height, maybe even bigger and the width of the spacecraft would be the St Paul Cathederal on its side.
They said around the 1970s they discovered a signal coming 6 light years away which is like 36 million million miles away, which they thought could be other beings communicating. It was like beeps and stuff, they tried to locate the location it came from and they said it might be coming from the Barnard Star which is in a perfect position to form life.
Now they say by building the Daedalus to reach the Barnard it would take 47 years to get there, even with full power. The problem they have found is that Earths total Helium 3 (fuel) rate is 3700 tons, yes thats the TOTAL found on earth. For each Daedalus ship they need 40,000 tons of Helium 3.
With further research and confusion they have found that Jupiter is filled with 20% of Helium 3 which is eqivalent to about 10,000,000,000 tons of Helium 3, more than enough. They will be sending spacecrafts called "Ramjets" to collect all the Helium 3 and bring it back to use. Couldn't that be why the planets are there for?? Resources and stuff. One of Jupiters moons were found to be full of salt even.
They say the Daedalus is necessary for this mission cause the power is much more intense than a normal spacecraft which would have taken 60,000 years to reach the Star compared to 47 years. The other problem is that the blast is going to be too intense, EACH minute the Daeduls is in motion, the power of the Daedalus ship has the same power as 15,000 Hiroshima bombs being blown up at the same time.
Though some of these are only thoughts until they come to a better conclusion but i just found this cool :).
In this book it says these are the specifications of the ship
Design Mission: Undecelerated fly-through if Barnards Star
Total Flight Time: 47 years
Engine Exhaust Velocity: 10^7 m/s Main Engine and Secondery Engine
Payload Mass: 500 tonnes including communications and auxiliary propellants and shielding.
Final Vehicle Mass: 990 tonnes
Light-up Mass 68,620 tonnes, including tankage, main engine and propellants.
Boost Period: 2.2 years main engine
2.0 years secondary engine
Final Velocity: 13.8% the speed of light
Propellants: D, He3
Engine Type: Nuclear Pulse Rocket
Inginition System: Relativistic Electron Beam Compression
Energy Release Rate: 2.24 x 10^4 T/sec (main engine)
3.80 x 10^3 T/sec (Secondary Engine)
Thrust: 860 tonnes (Main Engine)
145 tonnes (Secondery Engine)
This sound like a bit off a game ay hehe, but this is really being built but the confusion is set at how they can actually build it.
Sorry if this is news is old to people, but i found it too exciting to pass and yes i know this isn't trance :)
What do you think of this project? |
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| Mebot |
sounds interesting but i doubt it will happen, because it will cost too much,
But if it does happen i doubt it will happen in my lifetime.
Reminds me of that old 3DO game the Daedalus Encounter |
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| Audigy7 |
| I doubt it will happen anytime in the near future, but I sure hope it does. |
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| zarathustra |
| It's a very exciting thought, imagine, sending a probe to another STAR (!) during my lifetime. Freakin wicked. |
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| Tranc3 |
| Damn that'd be hella tight if it happens in my lifetime. And if not, it's still freakin awesome. |
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| Psygnosis |
Yes i was thinking that too, I just hope it happens in this lifetime BUT the Helium 3 collection time will take 18 years to do, they can't send Daedalus off without this fuel. But this is to the range of technolgy that we now possess and this will become true. Now when they send Daedalus off they want to be recording EVERYTHING, information to visual pictures. The scheme is for taking something like 1000 television pictures of the 10 day approach and fly through of the Barnard Star system, the pictures would be stored as bits of binary info. About 6 million bits would form a picture so for a 1000 pictures the compter would need to store 6000 million bits of info, these then would be sent back to Earth at 300 bits a sec, which will take 7.5 months to do. I just find this very interesting.
Now this Daedalus project will consist of many more ships cause there by far more exploring to do, theirs also a star close to us that seems to be wobbling maybe of the end of its life to cause a Supernova, in total i think they are building or trying to build 5 of them to visit all over the universe, should be fun :p |
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