NASA works hand in hand with Stephen Hawking and led by Russian Philanthropist Yuri Milner in order to build a nano-spacecraft that can travel to Alpha Centauri.

Alpha Centauri is known as the nearest star system to the Earth. It will take 20 years to reach Alpha Centauri traveling at around one-fifth the speed of light. This speed is about a hundred times faster than any other spacecraft.

According to Breakthrough Initiatives, the “Starshot” project aims to gather more important information about the solar system and at the same time check a new possible habitat for humans. This project will also be of great help in detecting possible asteroids that will go to the Earth.

Jobs & Hire previously reported that the NASA was able to detect an incoming asteroid. Through the NASA’s new device called “intruder alert,” they were able to spot the asteroid that can cause harm to the Earth. And now with the “Starshot” project in the works, there will be more innovative ways in detecting asteroids.

Meanwhile, Independent reported that NASA and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) were able to detect possible problems in this project. The high-energy radiation in space might bring about serious damages to the spacecraft. This can affect the chip’s silicon dioxide layer.

However, NASA’s team is already working on ways to solve such problem. One possible thing to do is rerouting the chip’s direction to avoid extreme radiation. But then doing this will only add additional time to the mission. At the same time, doing this will also limit explorations that are also a vital element of the project.

Another option might be the “self-healing” transistors. In some ways, doing this will defeat the purpose of building a nano-spaceship because this will add more weight to the chips, per IEEE.org.

Jin-Woo Han, one of the members of the NASA team, said that “On-chip healing has been around for many, many years.” KAIST team said that this kind of chip can be used for both flash memory and the logic transistors. For now, the question still remains whether the spacecraft will be able to survive a trip as long as two decades.