Starseed is a proposed method of launching interstellar nanoprobes at one-third light speed. The launcher uses a 1,000 km-long small-diameter hollow wire, with

electrode An electrode is an electrical conductor used to make contact with a nonmetallic part of a circuit (e.g. a semiconductor, an electrolyte, a vacuum or air). Electrodes are essential parts of batteries that can consist of a variety of materials de ...

s lining the hollow wire, an electrostatic accelerator tube, similar to

K. Eric Drexler Kim Eric Drexler (born April 25, 1955) is an American engineer best known for studies of the potential of molecular nanotechnology (MNT), from the 1970s and 1980s. His 1991 doctoral thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was revised and ...

's ideas. The launcher is designed to accelerate its probes to 1/3 the

speed of light The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted , is a universal physical constant that is important in many areas of physics. The speed of light is exactly equal to ). According to the special theory of relativity, is the upper limit ...

, about 100,000 kilometers per second, at something on the order of 100 million gravities of

acceleration In mechanics, acceleration is the rate of change of the velocity of an object with respect to time. Accelerations are vector quantities (in that they have magnitude and direction). The orientation of an object's acceleration is given by the ...

. Keeping the launch tube straight enough to avoid the probe hitting the tube walls is a major challenge. The launcher would have to be set up in deep space, well away from any planets, to avoid gravitational

tide Tides are the rise and fall of sea levels caused by the combined effects of the gravity, gravitational forces exerted by the Moon (and to a much lesser extent, the Sun) and are also caused by the Earth and Moon orbiting one another. Tide t ...

effects bending the tube too much. The proposed starseed probes would be extremely small (roughly one microgram) nanomachines and nanocomputers. The required launch energy per probe would be low due to the low mass, and many nanoprobes would be launched in sequence and rendezvous in flight.

References

Reference to Starseed concept in paper from 2010 International Planetary Probe Workshop
Hypothetical spacecraft Interstellar travel {{spacecraft-stub