There's no mention of instrumentation or relaying information back to earth. If there is none, what would be the point? I wonder what can be achieved in something "about the size of a microchip".
What if you have a fleet of thousands of these acting as a cluster? All of them would have some limited radio capability to communicate with other nearby probes. Some would carry additional instruments to collect data near the star, and others would have higher-powered radios to send data back to Earth.
It doesn't sound like you could fit this kind of system in the size of a microchip, but what do I know, I'm just a random Internet speculator.
If simple and small enough, railgun grains-of-rice sized probes at every "near" object in the visible galaxy and create a million node network to relay and repeat back to earth.
Get the cost down to $100 each.
Time the launching to say once a day so they travel behind each other as repeaters.
Then they only need small transmitters/receivers with small power sources.
And 4+ years added to find out what it finds. Also a very high speed camera that can maybe capture something interesting once you get to your destination because I don’t think it can arrive and stop… it’ll just buzz past at 20% speed of light
That's why I think it's not a worthy effort right now. You won't be able to aim correctly so you may speed by objects at large distance at an incredible speed with very small cameras. I wonder if the results ill wbe any better than what you can from earth (or will be able to do if you invest some money)
