Abstract
If we wish to emulate Alice and venture far into the garden of interstellar vastness, it may be necessary to shrink our spaceprobes — and possibly even the passengers of later interstellar colonisation ships! We can see the necessity for such drastic measures by investigating kinetic energy requirements for a ‘modest’ interstellar probe.
And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)
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Matloff, G.L. (2000). The incredible shrinking spaceprobe. In: Deep-Space Probes. Space Exploration. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3641-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3641-5_5
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