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NASA hopes to send a probe to Alpha Centauri in 2069
If you thought NASA was playing the long game with its plan to put people on Mars in the 2030s, you haven't seen anything yet. New Scientist has learned that a team at the administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has started planning a mission that would send a spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri system in... 2069. Yes, that's 52 years away, and timed around the 100th anniversary of Apollo 11's trip to the Moon. The probe would look for signs of life around the potentially habitable exoplanet Proxima b, giving humanity a much better look than it could get with observation from home.
After Math: Only the essentials
It was a pretty kick-ass week in terms of interplanetary exploration -- and not even just in NMS. Astronomers found a potentially habitable planet just 4.2 light years from us! This could be our first stop beyond Mars but it's going to take a while to get there, so we're going to have to travel light. That means bringing nothing but the most essential of supplies -- like scouter drones, custom-designed hazmat suits, efficient solar power generators and 8K televisions. Numbers, because how else are you going to calculate the interstellar rocket's payload fraction?
There's a potentially habitable planet just one star over
Locating potentially habitable planets outside of our own solar system is pretty difficult -- and when we do find them, they're usually unfathomably far away. Today, one isn't. Astronomers have discovered a new exoplanet in the habitable zone of Earth's nearest neighboring solar system. For now, it's called Proxima b, and it's just over four light years away.
