NASA Researching Antimatter Engines

dbolger writes: "CNN has a story about how scientists at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama are researching ways to use antimatter to fuel missions to Mars and beyond within the next 50 years. It very light on technical details, but does give an interesting look at current and future potential uses of antimatter."

Comments

antimatter versus antiatoms; containment

[bcrowell]

The article doesn't distinguish between antimatter and antiatoms. Antimatter is easy to produce, and even occurs naturally in cosmic ray events and the decay of natural radioactive substances. Antiatoms are a different story. The simplest antiatom is an antiproton plus an antielectron, which makes an antihydrogen. Last I heard, only about 10 antihydrogen atoms had ever been made. The article refers to antimatter being made in microgram quantities; if so, then this is a /major/ advance over the state of the art ~5 years ago.

Containment depends on what form it's in. Slashdotters have been referring to Penning traps here. Well, a Penning trap only works for charged particles, not neutral atoms, and it only traps one sign of charge -- you can't trap both + and - particles in the same Penning trap. Therefore, I don't think a Penning trap would be suitable for storing even microgram quantities of bulk matter; if you have matter or antimatter in bulk quantities, it has to be electrically neutral. I think the posters were confused between containment of plasma and containment of antimatter.

Containing antimatter, if you had it in bulk quantities, would be much easier than containing a plasma, since it doesn't have to be superhot like a plasma. You have to have an extremely good vacuum, however, because any matter that finds its way in will annihilate with the antimatter. I doubt that even the vacuum of interplanetary space would be good enough.