The Revolutionary Reason to Send a Dumb Probe - or Any Probe - to Alpha Centauri

In the debate over sending a probe to Alpha Centauri, some have legitimately questioned whether it would not be better to put instrumentation on the probe to create a signal beacon. Such instrumentation would be acceptable, as long as it does not prohibitively create too much mass to accelerate the probe. The design philosophy is to reduce the mass of the probe by eliminating everything except the probe itself. Of course, if a probe can be built with signaling instrumentation and still be accelerated to relativistic speeds, then that is all the better. The point is that for a first run at Alpha Centauri, the probe does not need instrumentation - it would still be valuable science.

Reasonable minds can differ as to the cost-effectiveness of putting instrumentation on the probe, as long as acceleration to relativistic speeds can still be accomplished. Certainly future probes would be designed that would include a range of instrumentation. It is quite probable that micro-instruments - for things like communication, photography, spectroscopy, and the other things solar system probes now do - will eventually be included on interstellar probes.

It is important to remember that Americans didn't just launch a rocket to the moon on the first try. There were many trials and failures along the way as scientists learned things like how to control the rocket on its trajectory.

So too, a first launch to Alpha Centauri would provide scientists with extraordinary learning experience. For one thing, scientists have never sent a probe along a relativistic trajectory. All current probes move along a classical trajectory. The solar system probes move at classical, not relativistic speeds.

So it is not entirely accurate to write that a probe having no instrumentation would "generate no data and produce nothing of interest to us" (see comments to the main article). The probe itself would create perturbations that could be detected by the right type of telescope, just as a planet was recently detected orbiting Formalhaut (or "Fomalhaut" - see picture above). The data created would be two-fold: First, a confirmation of the parameters used to accelerate the probe along its relativistic trajectory; and second, the signals created by the probe itself as it moves through the dust cloud surrounding Alpha Centauri. These signals would be just as effective as an artificial signal created by the probe. Both would take about four light years to reach Earth.