Crowdscience

The space between stars is usually measured in light years, but this makes it less easy to acknowledge the true scale of the distance. Even the closest star system to Earth, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years or 40.13 trillion kilometres from Earth. If we are ever going to bridge the gap between the stars, we will have to have some very fast spaceships, with extremely reliable, long-lasting technology on board. So does science allow for these spacecraft to exist? That’s what listener Allan wants to know, and to find out, Presenter Anand Jagatia speaks with Tracy Drain, a systems engineer at NASA JPL responsible for overseeing the development and missions of multiple unmanned interplanetary probes including some around Jupiter and Mars. She tells us the challenges involved with simply keeping our spacecraft working for the long-haul. Even if we can overcome issues of wear and tear over time, powering a ship to other star systems will not be easy. Today’s chemical rockets are too inefficient for the job, s