A NASA TEM UM PLANO DE MANDAR 1000 SONDAS PARA PROXIMA B!!!

ENROLL NOW IN THE SPACE TODAY TOTAL ASTRONOMY COURSE!!! Link to the page: https://lp.academyspace.com.br/ What if humanity managed, this century, to send a fleet of probes to another star and, in twenty-one years, receive the first high-resolution photos of a planet outside the Solar System? It sounds like fiction, but that's what a group of scientists has just proposed in an article published in April 2026 on arXiv (paper 2604.20182), led by T. Marshall Eubanks, with participation from NASA's JPL, the Paris Observatory, Arizona State University, Florida Tech, and Breakthrough Starshot. The destination is Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, 4.24 light-years away. Orbiting this small red dwarf is Proxima b, a rocky exoplanet similar in size to Earth, within the habitable zone. He is, without exaggeration, the best candidate for a "second Earth" that we know of. The problem has always been the same: distance. Voyager 1, the fastest object ever launched by humanity, would take about eighty thousand years to get there. Therefore, the paper proposes a radical idea: laser sails propelled by ultra-powerful beams fired from Earth, capable of accelerating small probes to twenty percent of the speed of light, or sixty thousand kilometers per second. The proposal details a mission with a thousand "Coracles," pico-probes weighing only a few grams each, launched in sequence. In space, they regroup using friction with the interstellar medium and form a coherent swarm, flying "sideways" to minimize the impact of cosmic dust. The energy comes from betavoltaic batteries of Strontium-90. To communicate with Earth, the probes synchronize their clocks at the nanosecond level and fire laser pulses simultaneously, creating a "wall of light" that arrives as a single strong signal. The predicted rate is 0.9 kbps, or 3.4 gigabytes per year, comparable to the return of New Horizons to Pluto. But Proxima b's flyby will last less than a minute. With terabytes collected in that instant, how do you choose what to send? The paper solves this with embedded autonomous artificial intelligence agents, called "sorting hat data brokers," which divide the work among the probes and avoid what the authors jokingly call the "Paris Selfie Problem": a thousand tourists sending the same photo of the Eiffel Tower. And the most impressive point: the paper openly discusses the detection of biosignatures and technosignatures. With resolutions of up to sixty meters per pixel on the illuminated side, the probes can search for the "red edge of vegetation," oxygen, methane, dimethyl sulfide, and even artificial gases like CFCs, NF3, and SF6. On the night side, they can directly photograph city lights. It's the first detailed proposal, with real engineering, for a mission capable of answering: are we alone? The paper is also honest about the challenges: Proxima b's ephemeris still has too many large errors, cosmic rays could damage the electronics in two decades of flight, and building the launch laser will cost billions of dollars. But the basic science is ready, and NASA's NIAC contracts and the Breakthrough Starshot Foundation are already funding the studies. In today's video, I explain step-by-step how this swarm will work, how a three-gram probe can take gigapixel photos, and why this could literally be humanity's first mission to another star. Don't forget to like, subscribe to the channel, activate the bell, and comment below: do you believe we'll see this launch in our lifetime? Original paper: arXiv:2604.20182 (Eubanks et al., 2026) #NASA #PROXIMAB #SCIENCE