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NASA to Research Antimatter Rocket
Fraser Cain writes "One of the dozen technologies selected by NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) this year is Positronics Research's ideas for an antimatter rocket engine. Instead of 3100 kg of propellant on board Cassini, the spacecraft could get by with just 310 micrograms of electrons and positrons. Of course, making the antimatter can be expensive."
But seriously folks...
Many of our upcoming challenges both earthbound and space bound relate to the safe, efficient, portable, and inexpensive generation of HUGE amounts of power. Whether it's antimatter, zero-point energy, fusion, whatever, let's get something off the drawing board and into service.
My laptop is more powerful than a 1975 supercomputer that filled a room, but a D cell battery hasn't changed its size in 30 years and today's best D cell lasts what 2, 3 times as long as one from 1975? We're still running coal-based and oil-based power plants that were built in the '70s. Is everything shooting along while power generation creeps?
Start a happiness pandemic
If they could make this work it would cut down the size of the object to be launched drastically. That would be a great thing, which in itself would make spaceflight more profitable. No more 3T fuel, fuel tanks, etc.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Could this be possibly used to create a spacecraft on which John Glenn could be placed, suddenly creating an "evil" John Glenn with a goatee from a parallel universe?
One of the major problems with antimatter is that you need to be able to contain it very very securely. The actualy weight of the antimatter may be substantially less, but the whole infrastructure to create it and contain it is going to be considerably more complex and expensive.
see a Text Widget
Captain! If we can't stabilize that containment field in the next thirty seconds, we're going to have a core breech. Wait... what if we reverse the polarity? Brilliant!
Antimatter. It's what's for dinner.
It's going to take insane amounts of energy to generate and store that much antimatter. Hopefully this leads to increased funding for particle accelerators though.
When he sold out his impeachment vote for another ride in space.
You can't use zero-point energy, because you cannot extract energy from a system when it is already in its lowest state!
s/can be expensive/is left as an exercise to the reader/g
Let's hope that they get the matter-antimatter intermix ratio correct...
310 micrograms of antimatter may not sound like much, but the laboratories that produce the largest amounts of antimatter (CERN, Fermilab, KEK, SLAC, ...) only make about 10 nanograms per year!
According to the Wikipedia producing antimatter is quite expensive. They mention something of $25 billion per gram.
That's around $7'750'000 for these 310 micrograms...
The actual technology of using antimatter to power a drive sounds great, but surely there will be great advances in technology needed to store antimatter in something light enough to make the difference worthwhile. The weight and size of the entire package are something to think about, but this still seems like an exciting direction for things to be going, and one that could perhaps make long distance space travel possible.
Business Voyeur
Work out the chemistry on it. The simple truth is that unless there is a fundamental change in energy density of chemical reactions, there just isn't a lot more to ask of chemical storage. That's why there is the shift towards "power generation." This is really just a fancy term for changing from where there is a chemo-eletrical differential (i.e. positive/negative sides) to actively causing a chemical reaction that provides electricity; however, there are two problems with this approach. First, it is usually easier to ask the device to use less power. Second, power generation at a minimum produces heat, sometimes violently and excessively. Batteries are nice because they are generally quite safe, reliable, and (most importantly) currently mass-produced.
On a side note, super atoms seem to be a possibility on "rewriting" our understanding on chemical reactions.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
We haven't got the power!
How much antimatter would it take to wipe out all human life on earth? My guess is in the 20g - 5000g range, depending on how it is "deployed". Anyone else have a better clue?
Why do I ask? Think about nuclear power. We are now worried about radioactive material falling into the wrong hands. Fortunately, we have some detection methods to make it a little harder to deploy. Now if antimatter becomes a common battery source (say SUV's have 1 millionth of a gram to make it run for the week), how hard would it be to make the ULTIMATE terrorist act?
Granted, the availability of antimatter on this scale won't happen for a few decades, if not centuries. But when it does... it will be interesting...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Without so much more technological breakthroughts (who will of course make that whole project pointless, because totally new options would arise), building a antimatter rocket will be impossible.
First: containment-> Its hard getting long livetimes in a nice good storage ring that doesnt suffer massive accelerations and other nasty stuff launching from earth brings with itself.
Second: containment part two: To power it, you would need a energy source of such capacity that could feed an ion drive or equivalent just fine without the need for antimatter.
Third: containment part three: if it fails it will give the a real nice flash. ok, with such a small one this doesnt matter (a normal rocked exploding is also devastating, but a bigger one would be like a nuke on steroids).
Fourth: Production of anitmatter: current efficiency of antimatter creation is somewhere around absolute zero... dont know the the exact numbers (the article was a few years old), but with current technology it could very well take the energy production of the whole USA to create that much anitmatter... for a year or so...
All those points dont mean that it wont be possible (or even desirable) to build an antimatter engine, but the needed advancements are THAT far away, that every kind of basic studies now are pointless.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Of course, making the antimatter can be expensive.
Shouldn't that be explosive? Or did I missed something when learning my Star Trek science?
I like the idea of trying to push along basic research with incentives.
I think they're called 'grants'.
In terms of destructive power, it's actually a lot less dangerous than you'd think: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon
When will NASA finally start investigating the chances of having am impropability drive? As long as it's not running the chances aren't that small.
Of course, making the antimatter can be expensive.
:^(
If we all just work together, I bet we can get antimater prices down so's the terrorists can afford 'em for their fleet of a gazillion mini drone aircraft.
Bring 'em on. -- George W. Bush
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As a public service I am creating this thread for the purpose of containing all the inevitable Star Trek jokes. Please do your part by getting them out of your system here. Thank you.
Why is Slashdot even reporting this? "One of the dozen technologies selected"... Wake me up, when there is a prototype... Heck, a blueprint of a prototype...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Lets make sure EVERYONE on this planet has at least a half a lick of sense before the introduction of technologies that could wipe us all out.
Would you give your five year old a nuclear warhead?
Speaking as someone who uses antimatter every day, I have to point out that at least now, antimatter is very difficult to make. We expend 100,000 protons (ones that have been accelerated to very high speeds) to make one anti-proton. They get "stored" in a large accelrator complex underground (much bigger and bulkier than a spacecraft). After about half a day of this, we produce about a hundred thousandth of a microgram of antiprotons (which we then smash the hell out of).
They say that a couple hundred micrograms of antimatter contains about as much energy as 3100kg of fuel, right? So what's the difference if either one explodes? Well, brushing aside the higher reaction speed of antimatter/matter and the random radiation flying around...
Containment of positrons is also *super* easy. Just use a Penning trap - a big magnet and two electrodes. And you could make it so small that it would be virtually indestructible. It would really be much safer than a giant fuel tank with all kinds of leaks and whatnot.
Anitmatter batteries would also be awesome. And probably better for the environment. People are also scaremongering about "what if the terrorists collected all the batteries in the world and made a planet destroying bomb!". So what? That's so far from possible it's laughable. You can make an antimatter container that's pretty much impossible to open without ruining it.
The problem is generating all that antimatter in the first place. Some nasty radioactive decays or a particle accelerator. And it's hard to make even "micrograms" of it when you pretty much create it one atom at a time.
m
this is not a sig.
Humans like to find new territory and conquer it. We currently have exhausted the Earth's surface, except for the submerged and frozen parts. So we have to go somewhere.
That said,
Space propulsion may end up being a two-fold operation, with a rocket or rail gun used to break free of the earth or moon's gravity well and a deep-space propulsion unit used for the long haul.
Something like a solar sail or ion drive might fill the bill. An ion drive is relatively inexpensive, but doesn't give much push. If a chemical rocket or magnetic accelerator gets you started, an ion drive could work nicely.
You still need "HUGE" amounts of power for a rail gun or rocket, though.
Feel free to ignore the above. I'm just waiting for an rsync to finish so I can shut down the old server and go home.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
The upper end of your scale, 5 kg, amounts to E = m * c^2 = 5 * 9e+16 = 4e+17 Joules.
The Russian Tsar Bomba ---the World's largest nuclear weapon ever detonated on Earth--- yielded 50 Megatons of energy, or about 50e6 * 4e9 = 2e+17 Joules.
That bomb didn't kill us, so 5 kg of antimatter won't kill us all.
To put things in perspective, the Hiroshima bomb (15 kton) destroyed about 1.5 grams of matter. The Tsuami quake on the Pacific, last year, yielded about 30 Gigaton, or 6.4e+19 Joules. That amounts to about 600 to 700 kg of destroyed matter.
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Hold your horses...
You dont seem to know your physics THAT well..
First: 5g antimatter wont destroy the earth. In fact, it would be more like a medium sized hydrogen bomb-> it doesnt even make dent in any bigger mountain.
Second: Antimatter is a storage only device. Every bit of energy created by a detonation has to be produced by other means, first (in fact, 1000 times or more, because of abysmal efficiencies). So to even have the _possibility_ of creating planet_buster or armageddon-device amount of antimatter, you need energy sources that could do it anyway...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
"Our long-range goals are five quad-trillion positrons per second."
What exactly is a quad-trillion?
1000000000000^4?
'cause thats a whole lot more than just a trillion
'Or else pizza is going to order out for you'
err... i take that back.
my information was apparently rather old.
while matter-antimatter reactions release E=mc^2 energy, the reaction spectra of matter-antimatter interactions actually tends into neutrinos, muons, pions and gamma radiation, so while it wouldn't be something you want in the neighborhood, it likely wouldn't be that much worse than a low yield nuclear device.
so... we're sorry, our bad.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
The posters here missed the mark.
Making positrons is actually much easier than making antiprotons. Pair production on photons produced in accelerators should give efficiencies of 5 to 10% -- and the positrons are much easier to cool.
The big problem with positrons is storing them. Unless these people have a major new idea to get around the Brillouin limit on Penning Traps, the energy stored per mass of equipment will be too small to be interesting (even worse than the energy/mass of chemical propellants.)
Thanks for the information and the links. Some interest. I'd figured the upper end of my scale would be good for a single bomb released from the air... concussion would wipe out life. From the Tsar Bomba link, I see I was wrong.... maybe by a couple orders of magnitude.
:)
So, I can sleep better knowing that a terrorist couldn't destory the earth with something that could fit in his pocket... he'd need at lease a U-Haul to make that happen.... end what are the odds of that?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Quad-trillion? What kind of number system is he using? I hope this doesn't end up like back when NASA used imperial units in a joint project with metric-savvy Canadians.
It is obvious that you didn't read the article, or you would know they are busy adressing the forth point.
Your first point is likely most irrelevant, cause containment likely needs to be able to much stronger then the few measly G you create in a launch system. Just an accidental fall of a small container could temporarily exceed a thousand G, a few G is nothing. None the less this isn't a impossible problem, because carryable positron storages already exist.
The second is a function in part of the size of your storage device, only in ultra dense storage with highly charged content would the forces become very large. And thus require some exceptionally powerful energy source to maintain containment. Even then there is a very obvious and nearby source, namely the antimatter you are containing. Just use up a part of your created antimatter to power your storage device.
As for the third, there is some possible concern there and it is obvious that any serious quantity must be strictly regulated to avoid such accidents. Forinstance not allowing mass quantities of antimatter anywhere near Earth.
However, even though each of the problems are solvable thus. I highly doubt we will be seeing this being used any time soon. Maybe in a few decades time though.
1. Technology -- use of tools -- defined and shaped humanity, and still does. If we turn away from new technology because we fear we might use it inappropriately, then we might as well forget how to make wheels and fire and join the other primates sitting in the forest eating grubs and taking up space.
2. Any advanced propulsion technology, including antimatter, is likely to be deployed only in space, not on vehicles launched from Earth. Manufacturing facilities could be base off the planet, as well.
3. Where did you get the weird notion of antimatter-powered SUV's?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I was wondering when we would get away from chemical propellant.
But for any energy medium we don't get out of the ground - we have to harvest/make somehow and that process almost always consumes more energy than what the final product can emit. Is this the case here?
Not that I care about the energy consumption so much, just the implication to cheap space travel and such, unless we get up off our asses and build fusion reactors.
But still, the possibilities are endless.
Geosynched Sattelites may stay up in space for centuries instead of just a decade or two, if they can utilize antimatter to keep their stationary orbit instead of propellant.
Spacecraft should be able to make trips at least to other planets like Mars and back without worry about having enough propellant to get back.
Manned trips to the outer solar system may be made possible for the first time.
Increases usuable payload.
Future advances like these make me wish that the spacerace competition with the Soviet Union was still around - who knows how much more exploration would have been made in our lifetimes......
Maybe China will get us off our rockers one day.....
Pffft, I already have one of these, its crap.
Second is containment. NASA already has issue of sending plutonium into orbit, a highly toxic metal that if inhaled will sit a persons body and radiate for a very long time. However, we can build very rugged cases for the plutonium, and rockets don't usually explode, and if they do they plutonium should be secure.
Building a containment for antimatter is a much more complex. OTOH, if it fails we will not be breathing it. It will simply annihalate, 300 micrograms releases arond 30 GJ, perhaps 9 tons of TNT, which won't be a huge explosion, but someone might feel it.
I see most of these technologies as interesing if we get some infrastructure is space. An orbiting platform making a antimatter would be a wonderful way to power us to intersteller space. Unfortunately, we have never been good at long term planning, prefering immidiate and simple solutions.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
...like that proposed for Project Orion?
Detailed plans were drawn up before being thrown out because of the difficulty of dealing with all of the fallout generated. We could probably deal with it today, and build within 20 years an interstellar-capable engine. At the least it would make round-trips to Mars a weekend excursion.
if you go to nasa and use the search for "niac" the top few hits are dead links....way to go nasa
1 147Smith.pdf
eventually, you will wind up here, which is a one paragraph proposal.
http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/abstracts/
there does not seem to be more info available, even tho this is public money. totally inappropriate - that my tax dollars should be spent on ill described and secret research, the proposals for which are not even public.
does this mean any wanker who can pen a paragraph that sounds good can get 50K
the time when we got surronded by a fleet running on antimatter. They had locked us on their planet and were hunting us down mercilessly. We would have all got killed if one of us hadn't remembered what we were tought at school about antimatter. THey really thought they had us when ... boom .... ... ... :$ Sorry, wrong planet, wrong era :$
:P
Wait! Mybe the planet was right!
5000g x (3x10^8)^2 = 4.5 x 10^20 joules.
That's fully 10 times more powerful than the tsunami quake.
Unless you send me 1 million... wait hold that...
1 kazillion gillion bazillion dollars!
Now, where is my sandwich mini me?
... is that it's hard to find a container to store it in. This is discussed at the bottom of the article, where they talk about electromagnetic traps. Also, they've invented a new number:
;)
"Our long-range goals are five quad-trillion positrons per second."
I guess that means 4x10^12, so that's 2x10^13 altogether. Way to go, Universe Today editors!
Yeah, you're right. Fuck that free speech bullshit! Satire has no place in a free society! Let's lynch them!
I've come for the woman, and your head.
Haven't any of you read The Dark Tower by King? This 'Positronics' company will destroy us all!
Also, energy released from antimatter annihilation doesn't come out in a very usable form. From this article it looks like most of the energy comes out as neutrinos. Space is full of neutrinos zipping around, but they're pretty useless for energy because they don't interact with matter to any significant degree.
It sounds wonderful to have some bit of matter that can be fully converted to energy but I think we'll have commercial fusion power sooner than this can happen.
Maybe they could figure out how to make smaller, safer fission reactors for these types of missions? Maybe they could focus on fuel efficiency, perhaps even making small breeder reactors for space use?
A researcher at Fermi Lab once informed me that, pound for pound, antimater is the most expensive material in the universe. At that time (5 years ago) they could still basically count the number of antimater particles they had stored in their equiptment (they probably still can). If you do the math, I belive antimater costs around $100 trillion US dollars per ounce to produce.
...En að Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað Er Nýr Dagur
Uh-oh: "Positronics Research, headed up by Dr. Smith" Good Heavens! Next it will be "MIT, headed up by Dr. Otto Octavius" or "NASA, headed up by Dr. Victor Von Doom" or "Scientology, headed up by L. Ron Hubbard". Oh the pain...
>Third: containment part three: if it fails it will give the a real nice flash.
No matter what kind of rocket it is, it has enough stored energy to put its payload into orbit.
For any given amount of payload, an antimatter rocket is actually going to be lighter than a chemical rocket. It doesn't have to carry the weight of chemical reactants. It doesn't have to lift that weight. Same payload, less total energy.
Best of all, gamma rays don't travel very far in air, so as long as you maintain the same range safety distances as you would for a chemical rocket, there's no extra hazard.
Third: containment part three: if it fails it will give the a real nice flash. ok, with such a small one this doesnt matter (a normal rocked exploding is also devastating, but a bigger one would be like a nuke on steroids).
Why would it? At the risk of sounding riduculously redundant... when you replace conventional rocket fuel with an equvalent amount of antimatter, the amount of eneregy is exactly the same
OK now, Looking past the fact that 'Antimatter' is in essence wholly theoretical (Sorry if this is incorrect, I am not too versed in my astrophysics), isn't the whole premise of antimatter that it is an opposite or a reverse of matter? And being such, would it not have a negative mass? Or in some way negate matter (or achieving equilibrium nullifying both matter and antimatter in similar quantities?
OK, I apologize for the wasting of your time reading this post, but it is just way too amusing. Thank You for making my day...
According to the wikipedia article mentioned above, blowing up a antimatter weapon, will not cause much damage, because most of the energy is radiated in form of neutrinos, which do not interact with matter that much.
If you think Microsoft is hard on it's competitors (or percieved future competitors), just imagine an industry thousands of times larger that is run by people thousands of times meaner... That's the energy industry.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Okay, so you've got all the energy you can use. You still need to throw something out the nozzle at high speed in order to move -- the rocket equation will not be denied. I'm skeptical about the "10% of conventional propellant" figure, and even more so about scooping propellant out of raw space.
After years of thinking I knew rocket propulsion -- via SF novels and popular works and, well, building small ones -- I took a policy course on space travel at CMU. Professor Morel (sp?) insisted that we learn the science first. I got all sorts of good stuff, and started poking around the engineering library for more.
I found, while researching my term project, a great book on advanced propulsion topics. This wasn't some popular work, but a collection of hard-core equation-filled research papers. There was stuff on what could be the next generation of fission drives, various fusion drive concepts, and antimatter propulsion.
Beyond the obvious containment issues, there is a BIG problem with antimatter propulsion:
The problem of opacity.
Antimatter / matter reactions produce gamma rays. These are extremely energetic and readily penetrate many materials.
This means that they are very inefficient when it comes to heating up a working fluid. The detail -short linked-to article glibly talks about shooting gamma rays into propellant. They will heat up the hydrogen or water or whatever you are using for a working fluid, but a lot of the energy will simply keep on going, and whiz right through the outside wall of the "combustion" chamber.
The one research paper which described a "pure" antimatter rocket heated the propellant indirectly. The positrons would be shot into a block of tungsten alloy dense enough to intercept an appreciable amount of the energy produced by the matter / antimatter reaction. Working fluid passed through channels in the block would heat up, turn to gas, and produce thrust.
The rated Isp was, as I recall, about 5,000 seconds. This is way more than conventional fluid / chemical rockets (500 seconds) and fission rockets (1,000 seconds) but only a little higher than existing ion thrusters (3,100 seconds for that solar-powered testbed that ran a few years back).
The one advantage this rocket would have over ion thrusters would be the amount of thrust. Ion rockets produce just a trickle of thrust. The antimatter thermal rocket would probably produce a fair amount of thrust, although probably not enough for a ground-to-orbit booster.
Stefan
My own speculation is that we'll manage Bose condensates -- say take a pint of deuterium, cooled down til it acts like a single atom (well, a large one), and a pint of lithium, ditto.
Push them together til you get fusion.
Two pint (eight ounce) sized atoms fusing ought to produce significant energy release.
What's harder to create, a huge accelerator ring for storing antimatter, or a couple of small college-dorm-sized supercold refrigerator compartments with a way to nudge them together?
Unfortunately, the problem for humankind is not the lack of power. Rather, the problem is overpopulation. It seriously destroys the environment. Each person contributes a bit of pollution. Multiply that person by 6 billion, and you have some serious damage to the ecosystem.
Antimatter purports to solve the alleged energy shortage. However, what is the solution to lack of breathable air, drinkable water, etc.?
Uh, guys, perhaps a research project could be simply a paper on the possiblity of implementing this. I hope yall don't actually think they are planning on implementing this, it's not what they are saying.
Second: containment part two: To power it, you would need a energy source of such capacity that could feed an ion drive or equivalent just fine without the need for antimatter.
But antimatter would do it and you've already got that. It just means factoring in an extra bit for its own containment.
Who ordered that?
I heard once that putting a proton and electron together gives this same effect of anhilation and release of energy, is this true? Why can't this be done instead then?
Now here's the big question I have. An electron is attracted to a proton but doesn't smash into it, instead it "orbits" it. So why would a positron smash into an electron, shouldn't they just orbit each other?
Thanks for your answers in advance.
This is the only way we are going to get into space in any worthwhile amount.
The tech has a long way to go of course, but its about time we actually started using the most powerful reaction we currently know about.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
An antimatter rocket has to lift the weight of the unit built to contain the anti-matter. Since at present that unit would weigh far more than the weight of the fuel saved the anti-matter unit would have to be more powerful than a chemical rocket.
WOW! Now I know how to play leapfrog!
What a great article! Nothing could pleasure me more than spending five minutes of my precious time reading about ankle-grabbing, bestfriend-jumping playground games... and a paragraph about scientists wanting to play it...
TFA sucks.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
If you could somehow bias the emission of gamma radiation enough, you wouldn't need a working fluid: you'd have a light drive.
That is, if your net energy consumption is negative, you don't get paid. In fact, you still have to pay the other fees on your bill.
This was sorted out almost a hundred years ago.
Matter can be destroyed. Nuclear fission and fusion are prime examples. It happens too in chemical reactions, but the mass change is so small it's absurdly hard to measure.
Rather than the engine design described in the article, there is a much more elegant and simpler one; you can find more info here.
The idea is that you aim anti-protons against a thick "sail" made out of some heavy element. The radiation generated in the annihilation directly propels the craft, in a kind of combination solar sail/ion drive.
The neat thing about that design is that it doesn't have any moving parts and needs no additional propellant.
Most blotter acid in the 60s was around 400 micrograms. Today 50 micrograms is more common, which is why one has to eat several hits in order to trip properly.
This antimater will most likely be used to blow up the Vatican.
That's a nice link. I did not know anyone was making and storing anti-protons. Positrons are common, happening anywhere you have lots of 1.2 MeV or greater photons interacting with matter. The problem is saving them up someplace before they get sucked up by a regular electron. You can easily see the energy of annihilation with room temperature NaI detectors and a gamma spec, like this.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
This might be the first time an entire government agency wins a Darwin Award.
Table-ized A.I.
They'd better not mess up on the units, this time. Besides, I don't think I'd trust NASA with 310 lbs. of antimatter...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Time to slip in my usual plug for Gas Core Nuclear Reactor rockets. The basic design, sometimes referred to as a "nuclear light bulb," involves a bulb of pure synthetic quartz containing gaseous uranium hexafluoride which is compressed to criticality by a buffer gas swirled around it, which also prevents the UH6 from touching the inside of the bulb. The reaction gets so hot it radiates intensely in the ultraviolet, which passes 100% through the quartz. Hydrogen gas flowing over the outer surface of the bulb absorbs the UV, gets superheated, expands and shoots out through the rocket nozzle to provide thrust. The radioactive reactants are confined to the bulb so they do not contaminate the exhaust stream, and the hydrogen itself does not become radioactive.
Here's a fascinating article that describes a design for a non-polluting, 100% reusable GCNR rocket based on the Saturn-V form factor, capable of lifting one thousand tons of payload into orbit and returning the same size payload to a powered landing. That's enough lifting power to take up a whole space hotel in one go. A nuclear rocket could also power a point-and-shoot Mars mission that would take half as long as the contemplated gravity-assist strategies, and carry enough radiation shielding to make the trip actually survivable for the astronauts.
Physics-wise, is it conceivable that regular matter could be "flipped" into antimatter, without having to input large amounts of energy?
I mean, could you take an atom, turn it into energy, then reform that energy into an atom of antimatter?
I am working a 12-hour owl shift overseeing the antiproton source at Fermilab. And reading Slashdot.
At this very moment, our pbar production efficiency is roughly 16E-6pbars/p, about average these days. That means that for every million protons we slam into the target, we capture and store 16 whole antiprotons. We're stacking at a rate of 14E10pbars per hour, again about average for us.
Having had almost five years of experience running particle accelerators and creating antimatter, I find the ideas in TFA to be kind of ridiculous. We are very far from being able to create antimatter efficiently enough to do anything other than collider physics, and even that is old hat. No one cares about the pbars anymore; neutrinos are where it's at these days.
Having worked rotating shifts for almost five years, I am tempted to apply for a job with the outfit in TFA, get out of shiftwork, and get my hands on some of NASA's grant money.
Cheers!
i was under the impression that fermilab produced about a pint of anti-particles for about $4.
so much for that. i guess i'll go back to reading.
but it seems ot me that despite the cost of producing anti-particles, i would think it would be horrendously expensive to *store* them, since they have to be kept quite separate from normal matter, and the only way i'm aware of for doing that involves powerful magnetic fields.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
"...we produce about a hundred thousandth of a microgram of antiprotons (which we then smash the hell out of)." You put the hell in there and then you smash the hell out? Does god know it's that simple??
"Dishonesty is one of the ugliest possible human characteristics. Being dishonest and proud about is about the only poss
Of course, making the antimatter can be expensive.
In other news, Vatican officials hurried down to St. Peter's tomb and were relieved to find it devoid of anti-matter containment devices.
I wonder if these "grants" can be harnessed to directly push along space craft.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Shut the fuck up, putz. Noone asked for the shitstain buttholes of the site to come forward right now.
Sit back and read, fuckstick. It'd help when you collect your welfare check.
You made a minor mistake in your E=mc^2 math. The mass you use should take both the antimatter and the matter into account because any given matter-antimatter reaction involves the conversion of matter and antimatter into pure energy. This results in 10 kg being converted into energy, or about 10^18 Joules or 125 megatons.
And in case you were wondering if the other poster that claimed bad math was right or not, he's wrong. The correct units are J=kg*(m/s)^2 like parent used.
"i don't want to die".
uh...I've got some bad news for you...
The antimatter must be one a hell of a job to handle safely. I don't see the future of antimatter fuel in a little light spaceships. Because of all the risks, only the large and heavy space vessels can be include all the necessary technology.
I'm not insane. My mother had me tested.
Also, you'll need a positropnic brain to control it all. But with the three laws and all it might refuse to do anything because it's too dangerous. right?
Couldn't they somehow use the repulsion of the gamma rays directly, instead of using them to heat up hydrogen?
AntiMatter. Wow. Boy that sounds sexy. And expensive. Maybe they can use pheromones. yeah, that's it. a pheromone engine. hahaha All we have to do is convince it it needs to mate with another star and we got star travel. Absolutely no need whatsoever to deal with anti-Gravity. We can skip over perpetual motion too. Anything we can't figure out we'll declare it un-inventable and pass a rule it can't be patented.
Humor intolerance unfortunately is not as easy to treat as lactose intolerance. The GP obviously got the joke but feels that anyone with a different sense of humor is not funny. Let's hope that the GP thinks that most people are not funny!
This reminds me of something a faculty member told me once about a chair in another department (after I had complained - confidentially - that that department seemed to be remarkably unremarkable). He said that the chair did not believe in hiring anyone more intelligent than himself - and that didn't leave many people to choose from.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
No.
It's power storage, and an extremely inefficient kind at that due to inadequacies of the technology used to generate it. The huge amounts of power needed to generate the antimatter still have to come from somewhere, and given the energy crisis we're going to hit when the oil runs out, that's a problem.
Robert Forward, a longtime proponent of antimatter rocket engines, is in favor of huge space-based solar power generation facilities for antimatter generation; it's not a bad idea. The point remains, though: Antimatter isn't power generation, just storage, and generation is still an open (and increasingly important) issue.
NASA has stolen the space modulator
How will you keep all the little sheeple in their boxes if they find out that they don't have to slave for a living?
It's nice to dream, though. .
-FL
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some are probably fakes but some look very convincing.
Just for reference, the plural of "anecdote" is not "proof".
The supreme overlords may not like it very much, but they'd have an extremely hard time suppressing a remarkable fact like a fundamental change to the laws of physics. They may be able to force technology companies out of business before they can succeed, but suppressing knowledge is a lot harder.
So unless you want to assert that the conspiracy is truly huge (thousands of physicists all looking for a more perfect model of the universe wilfully ignoring a massive piece of counter-evidence) you're best off with the rule of thumb that any "free energy" theory is bogus. No matter how many of them there are.
(The title of this post, BTW, is from Romeo and Juliet; Shakespeare knew how hard it was to keep a secret once you start telling people about it.)
Fast forward to an example of NASA doing just that - and they whine about how it's impossible.
Well, according to the post, Antimatter can be TEN MILLION TIMES more expensive than conventional fuel and still cost the same per launch.
:)
It seems to me that mentioning it is expensive after indicating that you go 10e6 down to 10e-1 is a little pointless. Very few things are that much more expensive than their alternatives and mass adoption will rapidly reduce the price of something.
Course, I could have missed something
Last time I checked, the cost to make anti-matter was running about $1 per atom. So your fuel cost is going to run about $10^18.
The Right to Keep and Bear Nuclear Arms.
Freedom: live for it, or die without it.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Yeah? Too bad. You're getting it anyway. Don't like it then come over here and do something about it, shitpie.
If being a nazi means that you shut the fuck up, then yes, I guess I am one.
I notice that you didn't deny being on welfare. Am I the only one here that isn't?
You must be Iranian. Go back to your ballsucking mother and leave the talking to the adults.