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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!"
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"
^_^
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".
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
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."
- 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.)