Can you say relativistic corrections hell? "Over lightyears" means it takes literally years for these things to coordinate moves with each other, to say nothing of post-launch coordination messages from Earth.
The swarm ends up around 100,000km wide. Initial distances are longer, but never on the order of light years.
It's amazing they can still do it with voyager which is roughly 24 hours for one way traffic, 48 for round trip.
They'll be spread out over a big distance, but team up to do imaging and to return data from that star.
Compared to the distance that you'd go to get a coffee, yes. Compared to the distance to Proxima Centauri, oh hell no. Compared to that distance, they travel as a pack.
There's about a "402 million to 1" ratio between the two distances, 100 000km size of the swarm vs the 40,208,000,000,000 km distance to Proxima Centauri.
https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/nearest_star_i...
A swarm 100 000km wide could in its entirety pass between the Earth and the Moon with room to spare.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/180561main_E...
If a swarm of bees goes a couple of miles away, they don't spread out over a couple of mile distance. They are a relatively tight pack that then goes to the new place and then converges to be quite small. That's the same as what this mission is.
100,000 km is quite small as far as interstellar distances are concerned, but quite big as far as an aperture for distributed imaging or beamforming (and for avoiding hazards that are hard to see beforehand). The latter, of course, is what actually matters.
FWIW, I looked up those numbers because I do not have them memorised. The typical reader here seems even less informed than that, and they would benefit - I don't think that "we all know these numbers".
(P.S. they're not the right numbers; just the right orders of magnitude).
That's less than half the distance from the Earth to the Moon, so leaving binary star systems to one side, the answer is none and zero.
A large asteroid passing 100,000 km from the Earth is a considered a near miss in my book, since it's easily cislunar.
But you're missing the point entirely; parent is saying that individual craft in the swarm are within that distance of each other - that's the diameter of the swarm; the line "The swarm ends up around 100,000km wide" gives that away.
The distance between stars is orders of magnitude larger. "the swarm" crosses interstellar distances and communicates back as a whole. But communications between elements of the swarm do not and cannot cross that distance, they have to stay quite close to each other, e.g. within 100,000 km as they cross the void together.
I think not.
> "covering interstellar distances" is misleading
It can be read in 2 ways yes (is the interstellar distance crossed by the swarm who do that together, or does the radius of the swarm encompass interstellar distance) but it's clear which one is intended. Again, "The swarm ends up around 100,000km wide" tells you which one it is. Non-naïve people know or look up that 100,000km is not even an interplanetary distance, let alone an interstellar one. It's relatively tightly bunched when crossing the 40,208,000,000,000 km to Proxima Centauri. Yes I look this kind of thing up.
> a certain naivete in thinking about space travel that compromises
Don't be absurd.