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Antimatter Propulsion

Posted by Hemos on from the coming-soon-to-a-theater-near-you dept.

er333 writes "A group at Penn State is building prototypes of antimatter storage for space applications, and makes a good case that with the amount of antimatter that will be produced in a few years, "omniplanetary" missions will become practical, including manned missions to Jupiter. They have some images describing possible missions and a concept craft design called the ICAN II."

2 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Insanely dangerous!! by Turing+Machine · · Score: 5
    One kilogram of antimatter let loose anywhere on the surface of the Earth, or in the atmosphere, will be enough to destroy an entire continent.

    Nope. I think you may have misunderstood what your professor was saying. Total annihilation of 1 kilogram of matter will produce about 8.9E16 Joules of energy (E=mc^2). There are about 4.2E12 Joules in a kiloton of TNT equivalent, so this is roughly equivalent to a 21000 kiloton, or 21 megaton nuclear bomb. A big bang, certainly, but not anywhere near enough to destroy a whole continent. Many nukes of that size (and larger.... 50 MT and up) have been detonated, and as far as I know all the major continents are still here. :-)

    Of course, the kilo of antimatter will also wipe out a kilo of normal matter, doubling the yield, but that's still not enough to vaporize a continent.

  2. The trouble with antimatter is... by Dan+Hayes · · Score: 5

    ... that currently, it's really hard to produce - as the article says there are less than 10 nanograms currently produced each year, and the projected yield from Fermilab's new equipment would be no more than 140ng or so. And this requires huge particle accelerators costing billions of dollars.

    And even when you've got these going, the cost to run them is prohibitive. And then there's the problem of keeping them stored for long periods at a time and transporting them. Despite a 100% matter to energy conversion rate antimatter has got to be one of the most inefficient fuel sources out there when you look at the entire picture! We'd be conserving resources by making coal-powered spaceships...

    So Bush is probably going to love this :)

    And an increased capacity to produce antimatter, while way out of our reach at the moment, brings new problems with it. After all, matter-antimatter reactions are far more efficient than even fusion reactions at converting matter to energy, and the military uses for this are obvious, especially to anyone who has read the Night's Dawn trilogy. It wouldn't suprise me if this sort of thing is being investigated somewhere as a speculative new military tool.

    Hopefully, I'm just being paranoid. But given the military's obsession with technological superiority, I doubt it...