The future of spacecraft is micro?

[RainDreamer]

Just saw this today. Sounds like a plausible direction. I am just wondering what kind of power generation we can use to keep propulsion systems running at that scale.

[Scotius]

Y'know, there is a good reason why we are still using full sized ships and planes for long distance travels, instead of kayacks and hand gliders. Oh, it can be done - but is it effective? Of course for some purposes such small spacecrafts will be preferable, but like in case of today's drones they will not replace 'everything'.

[RainDreamer]

I doubt they will replace everything either, but sure sounds quite good when it comes to pure data collection on a massive scale which is what the topic of the video is about. Doesn't even have to be high quality, we just need enough to confirm that there is something of interest there and send something more sophisticated later. Let's just hope we won't get fined for interstellar littering by an advanced intelligence though.

[ChrisSpace]

Humans can not be put in such a compact space (believe me, I've tried), so no matter how hard you try, micro-spacecrafts won't be the only ones.

Edited June 6, 2015 by ChrisSpace

[Scotius]

I would be more worried about the minimal size to which scientific instruments can be shrunk. Antennas, optics, even digital matrixes can't be compressed too much, ot they will stop being useable.

[YNM]

Yep. Think of Chandrayaan, Mangalyaan, Hayabusa2, CubeSats. Granted there's a minimum limit (for scopes and comms, more size = more science), but everything else can be small. Maybe one day you can get off-the-shelf scope, wrap something 'round it, and make it a probe !

[AngelLestat]

no matter how much isp it has, is still a rocket.

Communications would be difficult, of course you need to use many of those as repeaters, but the energy source? they are tiny... they dont have much..

big solar sails with instruments imprinted in the same sail has a lot more common sense.

Or... if you had these micro spacecraft... why they need engines in the first place? Just build a particle accelerator or magcannon and shot them to the planets or stars.

[KerikBalm]

Y'know, there is a good reason why we are still using full sized ships and planes for long distance travels, instead of kayacks

Surface area to volume ratios related to drag that doesn't apply in space?

and hand gliders.

Lol, whut?

There's no such thing as a "hand" glider, I think you mean Hang gliders...

And a more appropriate comparison is with a powered aircraft... a misc ultralight.

Oh, it can be done - but is it effective? Of course for some purposes such small spacecrafts will be preferable, but like in case of today's drones they will not replace 'everything'.

Indeed, not all payloads can be made as small as you want.

For instance... for a telescope, the size of the optics is very important.

For communication, the size of the antennas is important, the solar panels, etc...

But where things can be made smaller and lighter (which mainly applies to the electronics... cpus digital cameras- sans optics, etc), by all means they should be.

In the video... such small spacecrft couldn't obtain veyr good data without larger sensors, nor could they transmit a strong enough signal to be detectable.

Perhaps if they were working as part of an array.. but then you need to consider their aggregate size.

The redundancy would be good, but the efficiency would be bad

Edited June 7, 2015 by KerikBalm

[kerbiloid]

In the limiting case the smallest and highly specialized probes are photons.

No engines, no electronics onboard - only the pure result.

They already move with the greatest speed you can reach. While a micro-probe begins its flight, a photon is already here.

And you even have no need to send them - just to capture.

So the best probe swarm is a sensitive telescope. And it can't be small for obvious reasons.

But planets are ball-shaped and you can't look at all the planet at once without some Gargantua near it.

So, you need a net of several telescopes.

Also you need to gather some rocks without writing a code, just with a shovel and a bucket - it's much faster.

That means you need either mighty orbital blaster to vaporize rocks from distance or a digger with a shovel on the surface.

A semi-human robotic avatar can be a digger, while its human boss sits in a comfortable office.

But you can't effectively operate with it from Earth due to lightspeed time delay.

So to you need either to keep the office near the avatars (an orbital base) or though use a mighty orbital blaster.

That means: the most promising scientific spacecraft is an Imperial Star Destroyer with a swarm of cyborganic starship troopers. With shovels.

[YNM]

Ground based telescopes suffer from atmospheric extinction. You need some space based telescopes (which are probes in turn) - even, not everything can be classified out of spectrum. Especially molecules.