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

The Entire Plan

[fireboy1919]

The ultimate goal is to send an automated craft to the sun and convert heat energy into order, stored as crystalline structure. The crystals can then be broken down to generate massive amounts of energy, stored in a magnetically based containment system as heat and light. This reaction can be used to initiate a form of hyper-fusion reaction with electrodes to separate matter from antimatter within the byproduct.

This will spontaneously generate tons of matter in a very small space. Some of this matter and antimatter will be expelled in order to produce locomotion, while the rest is simply to compress the space surrounding the vehicle. After this, the matter-antimatter will be recombined, to once again, expand space. The operation of expanding/shrinking space will be repeated continuously in order to allow faster than light travel without breaking the laws of relativity. NASA has deemed this mode of transport "Warp travel," since space is warped in the locomotion process. Since this is the major breakthrough that allows for extra-solar exploration, it is theorized that it may attract the attention and diplomatic relations of any nearby space-traveling civilizations.
Well...maybe its just to have a source of energy that is extremely easy to use and very portable.

But we can always dream, can't we?