I mean you really don’t have much of an option. Much like on earth.

It’s nuclear energy or bust.

My guess is that people would really like to see it live. Sorta like how popular the "live stream of an eagle's nest" is vs. "a recording of an eagle's nest." There's just something about seeing it as it's happening, and being able to flip between different nebulas or galaxies or planets, with different types of telescopes and resolutions. I'm just speculating that I think such a service would be popular.

What IF I was tell you that there is a better way to do it?

N. S

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Yes, it wasn't properly abstracted, but others have explained that the urgency here is that the point in space they're trying to reach is half a trillion miles away and to return science in the lifetime of the scientists they want to try to reach it in 15 years. Get it done in my lifetime sort of urgency, heh.

Imagine a nuclear disaster on Mars. Could we even colonize at that point? Fallout cleanup is already so expensive on earth...

I'm acting like the dumbasses who wrote the abstract included an acronym without defining it, thus producing an abstract that makes no sense to the public... who is paying for it.

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It’s great to discover things we don’t know; it gives us the opportunity to learn more.

I'm a chartered physicist, and that just means that I can plot my ignorance on a chart with fancy-pants axes, such as log-linear space.

And it's still a straight line vs. time.

The older I get, the less I know as a fraction of all that is knowable.

All of those multibillion-dollar projects start with a handful of researchers poking at an idea for a few months.

Well, it depends on just how much you put in the reactor. The half-life is millions of years, so it's not really going to decay on its own (that is, you have to have the reactor turned on for it to do stuff, using its equivalent of control rods) meaning you can treat it basically like any other fuel.

And for how much you can get out of that fuel, it is theoretically to our best ion drives what those best ion drives are to average chemical rockets - so think running for months or years on end and capable of eventually reaching hundreds of kilometers per second.

The stream wouldn’t be super impressive. You’d still need to stack and process the image. You can rent time on fancy internet connected telescopes. I don’t remember the name of the service I used, but you could request specific objects or places in the sky. I had a free trial for one and it was kind of cool, but I’d rather do my own pictures.

It definite wasn’t live. They just sent you the data when they were done but it helped me practice stacking and processing

A couple years ago, I used parallax to triangulate the absolute depths of my own fucking ignorance. I don't recommend it.

Well that’s still pretty good then. Remember there are only two groups of people.

Those that can extrapolate from incomplete data

And it's been cloudy for a week where I live, boo.

Each project get $175000 and 9 months to do further studies on their project. Doesn’t sound like NASA considers this particularly urgent when they spend billions of dollars on other projects. 175 thousand dollars over 9 months is probably just enough to keep a couple researchers employees.

So put it on a one year delay or something. What does it matter if the stream is delayed?

How long can they theoritically run for before the emission run out

It takes a comment like this to make me realise there are people somewhere who understand this, and then I can extrapolate just how fucking dumb I am

They spent 175k to fund think tanks on how to do a bunch of really difficult things and you’re acting like it’s an active project.

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Fission fragment engines are being looked at? That's cool, those are actually some of my favorite high-performance engine designs, because they can achieve efficiencies in the realm of fusion rockets but are far more feasible.

In essence, what they do is have an exposed nuclear reactor core, and funnel the radiation emitted by it through magnetic fields and use it directly for thrust. The reason for that being, the radiation moves at a very high speed, and specific impulse is directly proportional to how fast your exhaust is. Biggest downside is the extremely low thrust, but it can run for ages to build up speed.

The main challenges for building one is managing the heat to avoid a meltdown and explosion, since for optimal performance the reactor needs to be designed in a way that is difficult to keep cool, and you want it as powerful as possible while also using highly-enriched fuel (and an expendable coolant will just make it into a much less efficient nuclear thermal rocket and defeat the purpose)

Other comments have said what an SGL is, but don’t properly convey just what one would be capable of. A solar gravitational lens can be used to image relatively near astronomical objects with extraordinary resolution. If we could get a spacecraft to ~500 AU it could be used to observe an exoplanet that is ~100 light years out at a 25 km resolution.

Someone looking at the Earth from 100 LY with that kind of resolution would probably be able to see signs of life.