NASA is Planning a Mission to Alpha Centauri in 2069
Exploring our current solar system is so passé. At least, it will be in about 50 years. NASA scientists, not content with simply putting humans on the surface of Mars or launching probes to blow up one of Jupiter's moons, are developing plans to send a probe all the way to Alpha Centauri, the closest solar system to our own.
From article, (NASA's plan will have their probe visiting Alpha Centauri and checking out one of the system's planets, Proxima-b, for signs of life. The planet does hold some potential as a fertile world, and even if that particular rock doesn't hold life, it's hoped that other planets in the system might prove promising as well.
[NASA wants] to send a craft that will travel at 10% of the speed of light. This is dramatically greater than the one man-made object outside of the solar system thus far, good old Voyager 1, which is traveling at a mere 0.001% of the speed of light (although in fairness to Voyager 1, it was never actually designed for long-distance travel between star systems).
this probe probably won't reach Alpha Centauri in our lifetime - even traveling at 10% of the speed of light, the journey is going to take a while. The star system is 4.4 light years away, which means that at the cruising speed that NASA is hoping to achieve, the trip will take forty four years - as such, it won't be landing on Proxima-b for almost a century from now.)
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