Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

chcampb t1_j4w7u93 wrote

Reply to comment by Weed_O_Whirler in Whats stopping us from sending a probe into a black hole if we haven't already? by stealth941

> launched from Earth. It has been traveling for over 45 years and has made it 0.06% of the way to Alpha Proxima

This is not a great example because the point of the probe wasn't to exit the solar system quickly, it was to do science within the solar system. It gets brought up as an example but it really isn't valid because even with the technology of the time we could have sent something out at a higher velocity, but it would have defeated the purpose.

9

aspheric_cow t1_j4wylqe wrote

The point was to get to outer planets within a reasonable amount of time, carrying a useful amount of science intruments. Also it has gained speed through gravitational assist.

The New Horizons probe is much more recent, and designed to get to Pluto within a reasonable amount of time. It still took 9 years, and it's actually traveling slower than Voyager now because it's had fewer encounters with planets, and therefore benefitted less from gravitational assist.

23

Lucifernal t1_j5df2xc wrote

Right now, with the current engineering capabilities of humanity, we could get a probe to relativistic speeds fairly easily (in the sense of how many fundamental engineering problems would we need to solve).

If economics aren't a factor, i.e. humanity decides that its collective goal is to make a probe go brrrr as fast as possible towards a black hole, and everyone is working towards that goal (money is no object) then it's actually not that hard. We can send a probe up with a small mass and a huge surface area light-sail, then build high-power laser arrays all over the earth en-masse to point at it.

I haven't done the math, but you could get something up to at least 10% the speed of light this way, probably even 50%.

The bigger problem is a) if we want to send something that has enough mass to actually contain the necessary functionality to transmit back to us from that far, then it becomes much harder to achieve any relativistic speed, and b) it will probably destroy itself after colliding with a dust particle.

And of course thats on top of the fact we'd need to figure out how to power it, we wouldn't see results for 4500 years minimum, and the second it hits that event horizon its gone from our reality forever anyway.

1