Could we send a spacecraft to a black hole?

Black holes represent some of the most extreme environments in the universe.

They are the sources of the strongest gravitational fields, allowing us to test Einstein's theory of general relativity to an extent impossible with small objects.

But we are also reaching the limit of what we can learn about one remotely.

So, various authors have put forward ideas for how we might eventually send a probe directly to a black hole to observe it up close.

One of the most vocal of those authors is Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in Shanghai—and he recently released a paper, available as a preprint on arXiv, about what it would take to send a gram-sized probe to a nearby black hole. ...