A Target for Icarus

摘要

In recent years, great strides have been made with the discovery of many exoplanets orbiting distant stars. When Project Icarus commenced however, that picture was very different and only a more limited number of exoplanets had been identified. The Icarus objective was defined as designing a fusion-based spacecraft capable of reaching, and performing in-situ investigations around a star and its accompanying planetary system within a 100-year mission timeframe. This limited the range of the mission and the search for a suitable target star system was constrained to be within 15 light-years of Earth.