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NASA Studying Energy Shields for Spacecraft
Shafe writes "SPACE.COM posted an article concerning enhanced shielding technologies research for futuristic spacecraft en route to Mars. One particularly interesting goal is essentially an energy shield known as a 'multipole electrostatic shield' that would deflect both radiation and micro-meteoroids. We're one step closer to Star Trek: shields up!"
IIRC, bombarding lead with cosmic rays (high energy radiation) produces secondary radiation, not particles. In terresterial radiation shields, a series of layers of metals is needed to provide protection: shield metal layer n+1 absorbs the secondary radiation from layer n.
Of course, such shields are too heavy for space.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
I found the abstract for the paper presented by Metzger, Youngquist and Lane here.
There's no metal spheres involved, just some sort of electrostatic field:
"We have recently observed, however, that the physics and the shielding problem possess certain asymmetries which may be exploited in order to obtain the intended shells of isotropic protection without deploying radially-symmetric charge around the spacecraft. The basic concept is to leverage a multipole expansion of the fields, assigning a different function to different terms in the expansion. As shown in Fig. 1, a positively-repulsive quadrupole term may protect the region closest to the spacecraft from high-energy protons and HZE particles, whereas a weaker but slowly decaying monopole field may deflect thermal electrons away from the larger region of space. The result is that the significant fluxes of both negative and positive particles may be deflected away from the spacecraft using the same electrostatic field. This has the potential to create isotropic protection with a significant reduction in spacecraft mass."
My other question is what sort of energies are we talking about here since protons are fairly massive? I would guess in the 100+ GeV range (ie. particle accelerator size). Any thoughts or better links?
Actually when it comes to cosmic rays, the spectrum extends to the EeV range and even beyond. Here's an energy spectrum. In fact I'm doing my PhD on the study of cosmic rays at energies 10-1000 EeV, much higher energies than can be achieved in current particle accelerators.