Even assuming you can slow down the chip once it gets to the solar system, do we even have a way to send a signal back?
In theory, you can relay messages within any power budget, it's only a matter of reducing the distance between ships.
Instead of trying to stop at the destination, you could instead send a stream of these tiny expendable probes past the target. Each one would get, say, a microsecond to take a snapshot, and then it would spend the short remainder of its life relaying the raw data.
To do a chemical analysis, some probes could be sent on relativistic collision course with the subject planet, and other probes could watch the impact. It would be a scale-up of NASA's Deep Impact mission from 2005.
Nevertheless, your point stands, if we consider technologically advanced life a possibility. It would be real shame to clobber someone's moon colony. Perhaps, these impactor missions should not be considered on the first expedition.
Of course this is a somewhat strange micrometeorite, but it shouldn't be too far from the standard set of space debris.
A big telescope on earth/in orbit could possibly do more actual work on figuring out stuff about a nearby star than such seconds-long flybys of such wimpy payloads, which is all you get even after you manage the non-trivial challenges of building the phased array, surviving the ISM, establishing communications somehow etc.
Seems like there'd need to be a huge amount of effort to set up the transmission point on the other side of alpha centauri, but it sure would be amazing to have stable cheap communications across light years.