If NASA green lights this interstellar mission, it could last 100 years

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The Voyager spacecraft have ventured far outside our solar system. Now a team of scientists are hoping to take the next interstellar mission even farther.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Voyager 1, which took this famous image of Earth as a «pale blue dot,» offered a new perspective on our home planet.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

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NASA/JPL-Caltech

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On its way out of the solar system, this proposed spacecraft could swing by a dwarf planet, similar to the New Horizons mission that made the first visit to Pluto in 2015. Kirby Runyon, also at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, notes that scientists know little about dwarf planets, even though they are the most common kind of planet in the Solar System.

«We have a handful of terrestrial planets, and we have a handful of giant planets, but we’ve got over 130 dwarf planets,» says Runyon. He points out that many of these icy bodies may have started out as ocean worlds that might even have been habitable in the past.

Besides visiting some mysterious dwarf planet, the spacecraft would be able to go about twice as fast as Voyager 1, and travel about 375 astronomical units, or over 34 billion miles, within the first 50 years.

McNutt thinks it’s entirely plausible that, like the Voyagers, this spacecraft could just keep going, and end up over 800 astronomical units or 74 billion miles away after traveling for a century.

That may sound far, but Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our own, is about 25 trillion miles away.

Designing a multi-generational space plan

Still, this tiny step out into interstellar space may help in designing future missions that could actually reach other stars, says Ocker.

«We do need to learn how to conduct missions over these very long timescales if we are ever going to come close to achieving any of the aspirations of interstellar exploration that are so often posed in the popular media,» she says.

To help understand how to deal with the intergenerational nature of this proposed mission, the research team reached out to Janet Vertesi, a sociologist with Princeton University who has studied the organizational aspects of other projects in space.

«A lot of NASA missions have this as a happy problem. I mean, the Mars rovers that were supposed to last for 90 days lasted for like 12 years,» notes Vertesi, who says it’s a different matter to make a coordinated plan for a long-term mission.

The researchers already knew they’d need to stockpile computers and other technical components that might become obsolete, she says. And they knew that at some point, they’d have to pass the baton to the next generation of scientists.

«What they hadn’t really considered, and where my expertise came in, was how frequently that has to happen for that to be an expected and normal part of the mission operations and not a major breach or big problem,» says Vertesi.

In hospitals, for example, frequent handoffs between shifts mean that doctors and nurses have worked out checklists and other standard procedures to make sure the transition can happen seamlessly. «That’s the kind of thing they needed to get good at thinking about and planning for,» says Vertesi.

She’s led discussions with the researchers to help them sort through this. Astronomer Carey Lisse, who is working on the interstellar probe study, said these sessions were «very blunt and made us think a lot.»

He’s done the math. «I will be 75 in 2036 when we launch. That means that I know I’m not going to be on this mission probably for more than ten years after launch,» says Lisse, adding that the need for handovers is just a fact. «This isn’t just theory or just talk. It’s going to happen multiple times, probably two or three times at least.»

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It’s challenging to anticipate how the program will need to change over over time, says Paul, and to look forward to «what the demographics of the science community, the engineering community, and the whole world is going to look like, so that this is a program for them, and not for us.»

Ocker, who doesn’t even have a PhD yet, points out that she’ll be late in her career by the time this probe reaches interstellar space, if NASA does decide to support it and if it launches in the 2030s. «I’m very hopeful that this mission will happen. I really hope it does, in which case I’ll be very excited to use the data when it does eventually come down,» she says.

She’d also love for it to carry some kind of contemporary take on the Golden Records, the phonograph albums carried by the Voyager probes to share greetings and Earth sounds with any aliens who might stumble across them out there in interstellar space.

«I don’t think we should try to copy the Golden Record,» she says, «but I think it would be really amazing to have a similar kind of public outreach piece that plays an important part in the mission.»