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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."
There is something definately wrong with the picture on cnn.com. This picture looks very wrong someone must have been thinking bad thoughts at the time.
There's an older (1999) article on nasa's site with a bit more technical detail.
Hogsback
When antimatter is made in the lab, it is stored in something called a "Penning Trap". Indeed, it is a type of magnetic confinement.
More info, here
I thought you needed a reactor core with dilithium crystal to make a matter-antimatter reaction possible. Can NASA produce dilithium crystals yet ? and visors for the reactor core technicians ?
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.
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Nuclear efficiency is in between. While there is not complete conversion, there is some mass going to energy, unlike in chemical rockets. However, nuclear physics is practical and well understood. A system would probably not work just as a bunch of bombs going off(though research was done on that, see The Binding Curve of Energy), instead liquid fuel, possibly liquid hydrogen or ammonia, would be sent through a nuclear core, then expelled. This would allow radiation release to be kept in check pretty easily, and a highly efficient super-heated plasma would propel the ship. In addition, unlike normal rockets the plasma could be controlled with magnetic fields.
While nuclear certainly holds a great stigma to many people, and is not as sexy as advanced antimatter/space warp/whatever systems, it is here and could be turned into a drive with minimal fuss. I could see a single nation/group(of sufficient economic strength, aka US, EU, possibly Japan) or coalition of nations getting behind this and making a ship to do it. The others will be needed, and research should continue, but if we want to go to other planets in the next couple of decades, this is probably the technology to do it with.
You don't understand thermodynamics. Of course it takes more energy to produce than we get out of it. 2nd law of thermo. For spacecraft, small and light is better. Antimatter, per joule, is the smallest and lightest allowable by the laws of physics as we currently understand them.
The idea is that we can use wind power, solar power, or crude oil generated power to make the antimatter here on Earth, and then take antimatter into space with us. None of those other types of power exist in space (except solar, which doesn't exist for any practical purposes if you start using antimatter propulsion to go to other stars..which is entirely possible when you have an exhaust velocity equal to the speed of light..well, almost, since matter and antimatter produce neutral and charged pi-mesons when they annihilate. the neutral pi-mesons decay into gamma rays that spray in random directions very quickly, but the charged pi mesons don't. so the idea is to shape the exhaust flow by moving the charged pi mesons when an electrostatic or electromagnetic field before they decay).
You're a victim of the same mistaken thinking that the comments about the hydrogen power generation story a few days ago were saturated with.
You'd rather have something reliable whose traces will not be overwhelmed by particle bombardment in Space.
That's why NASA uses prehistoric microprocessors (when it uses any).
And commercial Clarke-Orbit communication satellite are even more "primitive": no microprocessors at all. Just discrete wired logic.
Because it's a fucking long way to press the "reset" button if the processor hangs...