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".
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.
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)