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Magnetic Field Thruster Developed
ndverdo writes "There are reports of a working magnetic field engine prototype based on Alfvén waves designed by Austrian scientists. According to the reports fuel savings in rocket engines of 90% could be achieved. Other benefits include enhanced durability due to the nozzle forming outside the engine."
Is this economically/technologically feasible? I've been quite the sceptic lately with all these new "breakthroughs" that don't quite break through anything.
That is such a bad translation...
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.
Just thinking that it woulda saved me a headache ifn I'd noticed it was a babelfish translation earlier.
rewriting history since 2109
"with satellites the fuel up to 50 per cent of the weight constitutes, because on it also the life span depends. Without drive cannot be maintained the accurate position finally"
It would be nice to find a version of this article that wasn't written in Chinglish. Come on people, this isn't rocket science .....
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Mr. Crusher... Thursters ahead. Engage!
A bullet sounds the same in every language. So stick a fucking sock in it...
Then I realized TFA was a babelfish translation...
I love Babelfish.
I wonder if there could be any more domestic uses? Japan already developed a train powered by magnetism, so the idea.
Babelfish sucks so bad. I can't make any sense of it.
This will lead to more efficient transportation of eels via hovercraft.
My old sig was REALLY stoopid.
... Yoda is, apparently.
Cannot believe I the good use ability of this ingine. Change to better all space travel it will.
Should I feel dumb because it was a bad translation or because I don't understand what they're talking about?
I'm leaning towards bad translation.
Now there is for the first time a technical conversion of the "Alfven waves", which could introduce "a new era in the area of the propulsion technologies in the universe", so grass-sourly.
Beautiful.
One, score for rocket lovers! Much increased efficiency of rockets is making space elevator needed less.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
With the help of one on "Alfven waves" of based plasma propulsion the thrust of a rocket can be drastically reduced increased, at the same time the fuel consumption, so the idea.
In das Soviet-Russeland, der Rocketfuelconsumption reduces increases YOU! So.
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
to whoever published it. It might even discredit what might be a good idea (I sure can't tell).
Don't they all take like 5 to 10 years of English in their school just for things like this?
...and it was not "Chinglish"; it is the inevitable byproduct of using a machine without experience or intelligence to translate between two dramatically different languages. Grammatical errors are going to happen.
This sort of thing has been in the works forever and there's entire university physics and astrophysics texts written on it as well as related disciplines including plasma and ion propulsion. That the superheated reaction products of a rocket are ionized and thus subject to magnetic fields is well known. What is not well known is when we might make some use of this.
We do know that various superconductors are in that state when subjected to the cryogenic temperatures of liquified oxygen and hydrogen and using the fuel and oxidizer to cool such magnets would be an interesting thing. It would have to be in the line before the liquified reactants reached the nozzle cooling section but if it worked it might well dramatically reduce the size and thus mass of the nozzle and thus the cooling requirements as well. It depends on the tradeoff of field generating power equipment, coils, and so forth.
Ultimately the basic research being done here will be contributory to the future of space propulsion in its own small way.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I know it's Sunday, but lets think a little. Why the heck link directly to a Babelfish translation making the poor fishy run the page through the translator for every Slashdot visitor?
USE CORAL CACHE and create a Fish-friendly copy!
It's not ignorance anymore editors, it's pure arrogance. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Yeah, so you direct the tsunami that is Slashdot. Ooh, aah, wow. Altavista doesn't even get any ad-generated revenue. This is what will make people block specific referrers. I know if I was the webmaster for Altavista, Babel would not allow references from slashdot.org anymore.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
The basic idea of how this works is like a railgun, except you're trying to get the gun to move, not the projectile. Two parallel bars, with a third across the two, and massive current going through the system. The third bar experiences terrific force. In this system, the perpendicular bar is actually a conducting gas.
My God, that's the worst translation of an article providing next to no information I've ever seen.
http://bbabelfish.altavista.com/b%5D/babelfish/tru rl_pagecontent?url=http://diepresse.at/Artikel.asp x?channel=h&ressort=ws&id=512951&lp=de_en
A blog like any other.
To learn German than try and untangle that horrible babelfish translation. The funny part was that I read about 4 paragraphs before realizing it was a Babelfish translation, and the whole time wondered what incompetant wrote it :P
Anyway, here's a better(or at least another) translation done by ImTranslator.
http://webtranslation.paralink.com/webtarget.asp?u rl=http%3A%2F%2Fdiepresse.at%2FArtikel.aspx%3Fchan nel%3Dh%26ressort%3Dws%26id%3D512951%26lp%3Dde_en& dir=de%2Fen&dic=general&auto=
Although I'm used to translating Japanese into engrish... so, maybe I'm biased.
What about helping the fish out?
Rather than just caching the poorly done translation, make it editable. So when this is posted, 1000 slashdotters have already done what they can to clean up the text, maybe even add something relevant.
Slashwiki anyone? Use the moderating system and karma to determine what shows up for each person. Slashdot is great for finding good articles, but the discussion is difficult to relate efficiently. If it worked like I'm describing, people could make the online equivalent of margin notes.
I would love to make this happen, drop me a line at my gmail - djtumolo - if you want to work on this.
Can Babelfish translate English to English?
Good explenation of MPD
Dr. Emilio Lizardo has been seen skulking around Austria muttering about acquiring this new "magnetic oscillation overthruster".
Scattered reports of Austrian rockets flying right through mountains and into the eighth dimensions are as yet unsubstantiated.
... a chipmonk who is an expert in magnetohydrodynamics.
I guess the singing career didn't work out in the end.
Anyone on Cannabinoids apparently.. ;)
You just add sour grass to the existing fuel mix, right?
Lasers Controlled Games!
The Fish burbles:
""with satellites the fuel up to 50 per cent of the weight constitutes, because on it also the life span depends. Without drive cannot be maintained the accurate position finally ", so project co-ordinator Andreas grass-sourly."
"Up with this I shall not put." - Winston Churchill
--
make install -not war
Important scientific discoveries are published in English.
Further implications of magnetic nozzle control can be found http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/magbeam/NIAC20 05/NIACmagbeam2005.ppt
This is just an improvement to chemical rocketry. Wake me up when we have real field propulsion.
Not being familiar with Alfvén waves, I am not sure how the velocity of the exhaust is increased. Could these waves be forced via magnets to form a constriction in the flow, forcing the vented material through a smaller "exhaust port"? (This would be in keeping with the separation of combustion from the nozzles.)
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Come on ppl. This is plasma propulsion, this is not magnet whatever thruster! It is also not much different from fusion plasma propulsion (You need an energy source to ionize gas, duh!!!) Plasma propulsion has been around for a while. Do you think these sorry excuses for editors would approve this article for slashdot news? http://science.howstuffworks.com/fusion-propulsion 2.htm.
Of course not, because this is just encyclopedic... meaning it is not breaking news!
I LOVE YOU.
...they come up with Infinite Improbability Drive.
This sig is false.
I just wasted 20 minutes of my life. Here is the result:
The idea is 20 years old and was conceived by Manfred Hettmer, president of the austrian mars society. A new plasma-engine based on "Alfven-waves" could increase the thrust of a rocket while at the same time drastically reducing its fuel consumption. At least that is the theory.
And in practice, in tests the plasma-engine achieved fuel savings of around 90%, which is no small thing: "A sattellites weight is 50% fuel, because its fuel determines its life time. Without engines the sattellite could not keep it's exact position", says project coordinator Andreas Grassauer.
The basis of the development is a discovery by nobel prize winning physicist Hannes Alfven in the year 1942. Alfven was researching, among other things, magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), which describes the interaction between an electically conductive fluid with electic and magnetic fields, and also the propagation of waves in the fluid - now known as "Alfven-waves".
Now, for the first time, there is a technical implementation of the "Alfwen-waves", that, in Grassauer's words, "could be the start of a new era in rocket engine technology". The main feature of the technology is a ten times higher escape speed, that can otherwise only be achieved by a fusion engine, which doesn't exist yet. The measurements were taken on a prototype engine in a vacuum chamber. Also, corrosion of the engine is avoided since the thrust is achieved using the magnetic jet on the outside.
Economically, there has been some interest in the project already. Besides Grassauer and Hettmer the experimental physicist Norbery Frischauf, system engineer Tobias Bartusch and Otto Koudelka of the TU Graz are also involved. On the 15th of October the plasma-engine will be shown for the first time at the convention of the Internation Aeronatic Federation (FAI) in Japan.
Formerly NASA's Adavnced Space Propulsion Laboratory (Recently privatized to get more money) has indeed developed a working VASIMR based fusion rocket engine that HAS run off of what is generally agreed to be the exhaust from a fusion reactor with very promising results. By Very promising I mean Mars in a month if the engine is fed the power output of a nuclear submarine's reactor. Only problem: Getting said reactor to space.
My oscillation overthruster will put your magnetic thrusters to shame.
here is the orginal link in german of course. But who can't read that ;-) ?
NASA has had a working elctromagnetic plasma propustion system for a few years utilizing magnets to form the nozzel...
:)
**touched it**
This has loads of implications:
1) longer lived satellites, which by weight are 50% fuel
2) heavier payloads for rockets.
3) smaller more robust rockets--no more shuttle fuel tank explositions
4) launch the ISS in 10x fewer launches, making pH of acidified atmosphere 1 pH unit higher, closer to breathable.
4) ten times fewer mobile ballistic missiles to hide and still be able to destroy the earth
5) perhaps a return trip from mars.
6) my personal rocket car will get better fuel milage than my hummer.
7) New distance record for rocket propelled pumpkin toss
8) Jet pack, baby!
By the way, When will these be available for my este's rocket and bong lighter ?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Not the article, which is actually quite readable once you know a bit of German. But most posters reaction to this awful machine translation.
One second, time to climb on the soapbox. There we go.
Jokes about different languages being "messed up grammatically" or just wrong, or the (very old and not really relevant anymore) jokes about German's reallylongwordsthatneverend are lame.
Do you know what purpose words like those are for? Do you realize how incredibly useful that linguistic feature is?
I admit that German verb structure is uncanny at first. Especially those damn separable verbs. But even they aren't that bad. There are reasons verbs come at the end of some German sentences. EG a modal verb in the first position.
This really is no different than trying to use some wacky translator to translate smalltalk directly into c. It won't look pretty because of the differences in "grammar".
Bad analogy but I am continually shocked by my own geek friends who think it is weird that I like to learn other human languages. They aren't that different than learning another computer language, and the power they allow can be infinitely more useful.
And from my own experience, there are LOTS more women that learn French than German. Sooooo.... Learn some French and get laid. I think, actually stay away I like my odds right now.
And I am done, time to get off the soapbox.
Pick apart the English grammar/spelling if you want, I didn't proofread this at all.
To quote mister Mark Twain himself about German orthography:
Since long, my gentlemen, have I the passionate longing nursed a speech on German to hold, but one has me not permitted.
Even funnier if you understand German grammar. Just had to vent, sorry if I pissed anyone off, but these jokes are really boring after the 1000th time reading them.
PS: bonus for learning German, really hot intelligent German/Austrian/Swiss/Luxembourg women will adore you. Very few europeans even expect an American to know a tiny bit of any language other than English. Did I mention blonds? I am pretty sure I did.
We already have ion propulsion that offers specific impulses 5-10 times higher than those of chemical propulsion. The problem is, the thrust magnitude is very low (= 1N) and the physics of those thrusters prevents them from operating in the atmosphere.
Now the key difference appears to be this: Ion propulsion gains efficiency by having a dramatically higher specific impulse. Some performance of ion propulsion systems is sacrificed due to its low thrust/mass ratio, but the high Isp usually more than makes up for that.
The article states "The most substantial characteristic of the technology is ten times a higher flow-out rate, which otherwise only by a nuclear fusion engine - which (still) does not exist - is attainable." This makes it sound as if they are working on the fuel efficiency problem from the other part of the equation. If this technology does infact yield a very high flow rate, its possible it has a thrust level adequate for launch vehicles. Is there any word on whether or not this technology has any limitations to being used in such an application?
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
Don't be a flippant asshole! This article is poorly written! You claim the writers as YOUR friends?! Yeah, real smarty pants we got here. Bastard!
Here is the article text. Learn to stop linking to Babel Fish. Leave the cute fish alone. Or you can goto Alta Vista and start clicking on some advertisements.
There was a 1960s project called NERVA that used fission to superheat exhaust gasses at higher-than-chemical speeds. Though the German author says only a nuclear fusion (Kernfusionstriebwerk) engine could achieve the exhaust gas speeds of this plasma mhd thang, I think a fission engine (uber-NERVA) might suffice. Since NERVA was cancelled, obviously no working nuclear engine uber or otherwise exists.
One ping only...
In Mother Russia, articles translated by YOU!
sheesh ... this is not something Yahoo should be reporting :)
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
"Alfven waves" in the year 1942.
n dex.htm
o l2.html
! 1942 !!!!!!
That took forever! I sure they called him a idiot too.
"It was a GREEN pamphlet, Roger!, how can we possibly take that seriously."
http://www.informantnews.com/starshipgamma/crop/i
http://www.informantnews.com/starshipgamma/crop/c
Those clever Austrian scientists, designers of Alfven waves. What will they think of next?
Of all the millions of electric propulsion breakthroughs you can read about on the internet, the most promising one is magnetoplasmadynamic propulsion because it's simple, it can use plentiful hydrogen instead of expensive Xenon, and it makes enough thrust to actually do something useful.
Unfortunately, no electric propulsion breakthrough has done a thing for getting off of Earth. They're all for maneuvering in space and they're all roughly the same in terms of benefit.
The article seems to imply that the advatage of a Magnetohydrodynamic rocket is lower launch costs, but someone seems to be missing the fact that the chief advantage of an MHD engine is high exhaust velocity. This means higher thurst per kilogram of fuel expended, but also much reduced acceleration, far too little to take off from the Earth's surface, let alone get to orbit. Really, a perfect surface to orbit vehicle would have a specific impulse of arounf 1000 seconds (compared to the Shuttle's 452 sec)...
/ future_propulsion.html
;)
That's why NASA's own MHD program, VASMIR, is designed for in-space propulsion: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/travelinginspace
Simon
This "new" thruster sounds an awful lot like an Ion Engine. Not to discount this or anything. But theoretically, the ion engine can propel a craft to near the speed of light, it will just take it a few thousand years to get up to that speed. I think one engineer refered to it as "acceleration with patience." I guess I'll be more impressed when I see one of these things used in a vehicle launch situation.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
In Soviet Russia, Article translates you!
If you're going to meme, at least meme properly.
Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.
Er... wait...
"with satellites the fuel up to 50 per cent of the weight constitutes, because on it also the life span depends. Without drive cannot be maintained the accurate position finally "
Christ, I must need to increase my cannabinoids consumption in order to understand that one.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
For those who find this explanation a bit difficult to read, I think a translation to Korean and back should make things clearer:
In order for you to move it tries the fact that it gets the gun to except and this works to peel and as the basic idea the railgun, is two things which are not. In two those pieces two parallel seal and the system it leads the third, in vast quantity currently feeling. The 3rd stick experiences an enormous force. Inside this system, the vertical bar actual is the command gas.
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
Then it won't be useful for launching from Earth. Too bad, for a moment there it sounded like a new era in space travel.
Jokes about different languages being "messed up grammatically" or just wrong, or the (very old and not really relevant anymore) jokes about German's reallylongwordsthatneverend are lame.
...these jokes are really boring after the 1000th time reading them.
Gah, no they're not. First of all, the slashdot-standard joke is ALWAYS funny (check the mod points), and applied to this execrable machine translation in a new, topical way it's even better, whether or not your Mr.-Data-intoned response took issue.
Cause, you know, having studied sette lingue eppure le linguistiche come studente, that's the FIRST time I've heard the Twain quote, or the "I only know enough [n] to get laid, BARR HUHHARRR!!!11*snort*" joke. Seriously, you should go on Vaudeville with those lines. Killer! Oh and thanks for the soapbox imagery - how else would we have known you were offering an opinion?
Your post wasn't insightful.
All right, that's enough pointless-wasted-time being a Slashdork. Allow me to use the forum for good instead of evil, though, and allow my own geek moment -
[Spoken languages] aren't that different than learning another computer language,*
I wonder actually whether there is a difference. When you study linguistics and then you attack a new language, I think you realize that you're not going to become fluent in the language or have a ton of time to devote to it, so you tend to fail to learn vocabulary and instead focus on grammar rules. So you can conjugate verbs really well, for example, but you only know a few verbs. Anyone care to comment on how learning a computer language could compare to that?
*sic. Switching of compared item from noun to gerund phrase in original.
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
The basic problem is with the term "fuel". This doesn't do anything about energy efficiency of fuel use. It merely does something about "fuel" as raw reaction mass. You still have to get the energy into the reaction mass somehow and for that you don't have any good solutions other than the existing solutions. It remains the bottleneck for most all space activities.
Seastead this.
In less than a 100 years, English will be the only spoken language. English is semantically more accurate than all other languages.
Plasma dynamics are very complex and there are a large variety of "wave modes". When it comes to Alven waves, one way to think about it is to consider the magnetic field lines as strings of tension and the ionized particles as the mass along the strings. Since the particles are constrained to spiral along the magenetic field lines if you induce large scale wiggles (larger than the gyro orbits of the particles) of the magenetic field lines the particles will be pulled with the field and those large scale wiggles will propogate down the field lines.
If the plasma has a thermal distribution then some fraction of the particles will spiral down the field lines at speeds that doppler-shift the effective frequency of the Alven to be close to the gyro orbit. The particles can then be accelerated as they follow the magnetic field lines -- riding the wave much like a surfer rides an ocean wave.
So if you can wiggle the magnetic field of a stream of plasma you can heat up some of the ions and get them moving very fast. It is believed that this is how the solar corona is heated to millions of degrees while the sun's surface is a cool 5000 Celsius: collapsing magnetic structures at the surface may be kicking Alven waves along the tangled loops of field lines which couple with the particles and heat them up.
The way to make a plasma nozzle efficient is to figure out how to get only the hottest particles escaping the field lines and in the right direction. The cooler particles would have to bounce within a magnetic bottle until they picked up enough energy to escape.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
From the Wikipedia article on Magneto Hydro Dynamics:
In early 1990s, Mitsubishi built a boat, the 'Yamoto', which uses a magnetohydrodynamic drive, is driven by a liquid helium-cooled superconductor, and can travel at 15 km/h.
A rocket lifting off at 15 km/h is going to take a while to get anywhere.
I was midway through the 2nd paragraph before I thought to check to see if it was autotranslated.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
What seems different here is the combustion, which also turns the fule into plasma, is hapening outside of the engine nozzel... That would seem to me to be a huge advantage in keeping the magnets cool.
But one wonders what they are doing to power those magnets. If the reaction is occuring outside the engine, then they can't be deriving power from the comustion. I could all just be an over hyped side step of the issues like the guy who clamed his prius was getting 1000mpg when all he did was add a plug, and charged from the wall. (simp. Improved "fuel" economy, by adding power from an outside source)
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I think travelling at 1/10th the speed of light is a practical long term goal. Solar sails are still the best option IMO. If you really want to go that fast, you MUST be travelling from one star to another, travelling around in our solar system just doesn't necessitate that kind of speed, let alone acceleration :)
Improving efficiency should be the short term goal. Less fuel, ability to refuel at the destination, these are good things for now. I think 1G of accelleration would be good too in the long run, then the craft could have an artificial gravity. If you were to accellerate at 1G for 24 hours, you would be going nearly 1.9 million miles per hour (compared to 670 million for the speed of light), that aught to get you anywhere in the solar system in a week or two. Jupiter is 500 million up to a solid billion miles from earth, point to point. I wonder how much fuel and the proportion of fuel it would take if your ship was discharging the fuel at near the speed of light.
Sounds great, but is it one of these "break-through" which apologies for wasting our time and crawls back through?
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Nice article. I recall that you can drive these waves about 4 times faster than sound waves. Since kinetic energy goes like velocity to the square, this means up to 16 times more power (in theory). So this means in theory you can save 1/16 of the fuell (assuming the same kind of fuel for normal and magnetic propulsion), and possibly even more because you need less energy to drive the lighter rocket. Saving only 90% seems to be a conservative estimate. BTW, please do also provide links to the original article if you use babelfish. Most people prefer to read the original if they can.
"with satellites the fuel up to 50 per cent of the weight constitutes, because on it also the life span depends. Without drive cannot be maintained the accurate position finally"
!?WTFdgzOMGsh!?
Great one. Austrian to English = Austrish?
Imagine the unopened possibilities.
please type the word in this image: unopened
random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
This is Babelfish translating back into German then into French and then into Spanish and then in English...
The idea is 20 years old and comes from Manfred Hettmer, President Oesterreicher March society: To the aid on "Alfven it moves" of the founded plasma order that can be radically reduced the push of a greater rocket, at the same time the gasoline consumption, if the idea periodically. And really, in agreement with tests the plasma order leads a fuel economy of near 90 % - and that one is not thing little: "with the satellites that the fuel to 50 % of the weight determines, because he it life surge also depends." Without the order, finally the precise point of view mantienese ", therefore the coordinator of project Andreas Gras-sauer cannot." This Austrian development could lead too considerable modifications with the future space projects therefore. The base of the development is a discovery in 1942 of the physics of noble winner Hannes Alfven. Employee he himself Alfven among other things of Magnetohydrodynamik (Magnetohydrodynamik) that electrically describes to the mutual effect of a liquid electrical and magnetic leader with, gathers. Thus for example the propagation mentions by waves in this liquid - "Alfven moves today" periodically. "Now there is periodically" "a new era in the sector of the technologies of order in the universe" could present/display, if with acidity a technical conversion for the first time "Alfven." The most considerable quality of the technology is 10mal, above the type fliessen-heraus than it is only different possible more than by an apparatus of nuclear fusion - that (still) does not exist -. it finishes to the mass on the base a prototype in an emptiness sector. In addition, the corrosion was avoided, since the push takes place on the magnetic tip outside the object. On the part of the economy the interest by the project already, next to the grass that and Hettmer is acidities also that, physical experimental Norbert freshon, system to engineer Tobias combustible Bartusch as well as is indicated to Koudelka de Graz participate TO DO. October of 15 the plasma order is represented that in Japan on congress an association international level aeronautischen for the first time (FAI).(
Admit it! You're the guy who wrote that 'All your base are belong to us'!
You've got a long career ahead of you as a script writer for japanese to english translated video games!
Just guessing -
Is it possible to use a hybrid here?
A MPD thruster at the ground, which produces *huge* specific impulses, (has to increase the thrust level though) and then a chemical rocket to take it all the way...
Since it is at the ground, extreme high wattage even if for a few seconds are possible... Once the initial power is obtained, the rocket propulsion can be used to counteract the gravitational force only...
kR.\'
Sort of like what I have but mine makes its own power. Yes, I guess that's what I have. A thruster-generator combo. A very simple device. What do I do with it? If I tell it out I lose all rights to it. Wow, decisions decisions. Guess I better think about this a while: http://tinyurl.com/a5fvy . Meantime it serves as "Dated Documentation".
So it's like a railgun afterburner? Sweet. Oscillation overthruster, indeed.
"It's not my damn planet. Understand, monkey boy?" - John Bigbootay
Can Babelfish translate slashdot to english, that is the question.
I have a hard enough time on that myself.
Sure, but remember for solar sails your thrust drops off as the inverse square of the distance from the sun.
Don't forget that the pioneer probes are losing speed faster than expected. Presumably at some distance from the sun, drag would overpower the solar sail's thrust.
IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist--although I know a few) but it seems to me a three-stage system would be needed for interstellar travel:
1) chemical propulsion to leave the surface of Earth (unless an elevator can be built)
2) A solar sail, deployed between earth orbit and some place near (or slightly past) the heliopause
3) MHD/ion drive for interstellar space.
This chap read a bad babelfish translation of the artikel in the Austrian paper "Die Presse" on 14 Oktobre 2005. His reading also probably mistranslated the name of Dr. Andreas Grassaur to say 'Andreas grass sour'. Deutschen Grammatik is quite different
from some English, even if old English is just like it.....read Goeffrey Chaucer's works in the original old English. Verben are many times at the end of sentences. You will
sometimes here German speakers say things like: "I to the kitchen go!". The artical
DID, however, say that the process was scalable. Be nice to use a nuclear generator to supply to such a unit and have it be able to take off by itself.
So... Yoda is German?
:-)
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
The simple fix is to beam more energy at the craft. If you were flying toward a larger star then it might make sense to get as much of a boost as you can on the way there. I'm not a rocket scientist either, but I tend to think of GIANT spacecraft when you are trying to get going really fast using propellant, the solar sails would either have to be GIANT as well in order for it to be worth the effort. When you talk about nuclear rockets you are talking kilotons, a solar sail powered interstellar spacecraft could be 1 or 2 tons.
Now that would be harnessing major biological power given that rodents can reproduce so fast.
I'm not talking about hypothetical dark matter, which is no longer theoretically necessary to explain observations from what I've heard.
I'm referring to the observed slowdown of the Pioneer spacecraft.
Beamed over what distances? No beam is perfectly collimated, eventually you will get beyond the effective distance for using the beam. I'd have to dig out one of my old physics textbooks to be sure, but maybe some optics geek can tell us the limitations on this.
What are some reasonable assumptions? 100 km^2 surface area for the sail? 1000 kg mass for the probe?
A giant spacecraft is unnecessary. A solar sail of any size won't be able to get 1 kg payload off the ground though...for that you need a chemical booster or an elevator to lift the spacecraft out of earth's gravitational well.
Look at the Apollo missions--those massive rockets didn't carry the crew the entire trip, they simply boosted the command module and lunar lander into a high orbit. Have you ever seen a Saturn V rocket? Massive. Have you ever seen the space the crew had? Tiny. They had multiple booster stages, and yet those still didn't push a bus-sized spacecraft out of Earth's gravitational well.
NASA's probes have been using nuclear power for years.
Granted, they've been using it for powering electronics, not propulsion. Still, solar electric propulsion has been tested, and you'd expect a small nuclear power source could provide sufficient energy if solar power works.
Besides, we're talking about an interstellar mission here--you don't want to pack one or two instruments just to decide decades or centuries later that you need more probes. We're not talking about throwing tin cans at the nearest planet, getting to even the nearest star (other than our sun) would be too prohibitively expensive not to pack as much instrumentation as possible on to one ship.
You're missing my point. If you load up 10 tons of instruments for the craft, your propulsion system would still be 90-99% of the weight in order to get going as fast as you're thinking, and less than 50% of that is used for the initial boost, still need 50% for a slowdown. Even with a solar/nuclear electric ion propulsion system with such efficiency that you can fire the propellant out the back at half the speed of light. If it were solar sails, the goal would be to have the most lightweight sails possible, perhaps a small propulsion system to compensate for the maximum amount of energy we could beam at the craft for the boost, so that it can slow down when it reaches its destination, and maneuver into orbit.
I wasn't referring to the nuclear isotope generators. I was referring to advanced nuclear fusion power with the highest energy densities man can come up with, still future talk at this point. Solar sails are not. I think if you want to get somewhere outside of our solar system, anything nuclear is bound to be too heavy for any hopes of a short duration trip. The best it could possibly do is less than 50% the speed of light, probably more like 25% for all practical purposes. Those nuclear power cells put out like 100 watts each or something, very little, they stack 3 or 4 or them on most missions and barely get by. A space based nuclear reactor would probably weigh 100-500 tons.
It would be interesting to see what combination of solar sail and nuclear/solar ion propulsion works best. I'm no rocket scientist but like I said at this point you would want as little weight as possible, so I think any propulsion system would be primarily for maneuvering.
Ok, so the article is written in the english language, would it be so hard to write it in the english language that we speak?
jesus
Who approved of this article? There has to be a better one out there
Also, I think you're seriously overestimating the mass needed for shielding and coolant. Putting some distance between the reactor and radiation-sensitive instrument reduces the need for shielding, and we're talking about 2-5K temperatures outside the spacecraft, not 300K. Conversion of heat to mechanical energy (or directly to electricity) would be much more efficient.
And you still talk about beaming energy to the craft as a viable power source...You would need constant line of sight to deliver power--meaning you would still have to ship your power source off-planet. Even then, the beam would lose focus before you got very far away, plus tracking issues at large distances would be insurmountable--as the distance increases, errors in alignment become more crucial. For a beam tracking a spacecraft at the heliopause, error of only 1 arcsecond means you've missed the target by something on the order of 100 000 kilometers. If you allow the beam to disperse over some narrow angle to compensate (and this will happen to some extent anyway), you eventually run into the same issues as solar power. I just don't think beamed power is feasible.
That may be the case right now, but you get a lot more energy from a glass of water than you would get from the same mass of plutonium. Right now the fusion reactors are huge, but that's hot fusion we're talking about. In order for nuclear propulsion to reach the efficiency of solar sails, you would need cold fusion. Nuclear reactors tend to become irradiated, the substances break down, lots of nuclear waste, that will be the biggest problem. Shielding the reactor from humans may be easy with a long structure in between the housing and the reactor, but shielding the reactor from itself is the main problem, especially if you intend it to last an interstellar voyage.
It hardly costs anything to beam light to a spacecraft from earth. You could run 50 gigawatts of lasers for years and you still save a lot more money than if you were to load up a nuclear powered spacecraft. You put a couple of them in the hubble orbit, highly eliptical, or better yet put them in the lagrange points. You put massive solar panels in the lagrange points to collect the light, and beam it toward the spacecraft. Better yet, just mirrors and lenses. The spacecraft would come out of the solar system moving at maximum orbital velocity, the first few years would be in a close orbit around the sun with the sails at 45 degrees to the light rays, it could probably get going, I dunno, 500,000mph(?) with durable sail material. How fast do you think the nuclear rockets would go? They have completely different physics, it doesn't work in their favor. I did some reading, the ions coming out of deep space one were going 60,000 mph. Suppose you made an ion thruster that was 10 times more efficient with the fuel. That's 600,000mph. So, if the spacecraft shot 90% of its mass out the back it would be going about as fast as the solar sail? Even if the ion thrusters were 100 times more efficient I don't think they would be able to beat the 100% propulsion efficiency of the solar sail.
Honestly I think the only reason for the emphasis on nuclear ion propulsion is for interplanetary missions, like Mars, and just to have a nuclear reactor in space. It would be useful for a lot of things, not interstellar travel though.
Why would a reactor need shielding from itself? I've never heard of radiation-induced structural failure, and a carefully designed cooling system could easily isolate sensitive solid-state electronics from the radioactive material.Sorry, I think the laws of optics would limit your range much more than you seem to believe. I'm guessing that at the heliopause, your 50 gigawatts of power would not be dispersed over the area of the solar sail, but an area of a few billion square kilometers. Even given a solar sail 100 km^2 in area, your spacecraft would only be getting about 2 kilowatts of power. Within a certain distance of the sun, solar sails are feasible, but their effectiveness drops off with the inverse square of distance while the reactor output is unaffected. Sooner or later, the reactor becomes more effective.A solar sail can't make course corrections in interstellar space, either. At 600,000 mph chemical thrusters would have to be insanely massive to make a difference, so nuclear is the only option.
Admittedly this requires advanced technologies that are still under development (such as "electronic mail" and "mirroring") but I think it has potential.
What are you talking about with the "nuclear" option? A "nuclear" spacecraft uses electric propulsion systems, which have limited exhaust velocity. A nuclear reactor would also be able to ionize larger quantities of matter at once, thereby increasing the force of the thrusters, but not necessarily the efficiency. The efficiency primarily depends on the amount of electricity coming out of the reactor, which itself uses reactor fuel. I think I explained pretty clearly that given current OR future technology, solar sails will always be faster for interstellar travel. In certain cases the solar sail could be complimented with a small electric propulsion system, but I imagine it will not make a whole lot of sense to do that, the propulsion system would be more valuable for getting around in the destination star system. In regards to optics, I think you are limited by your own ignorance. There are more ways to focus a beam of light than lenses and mirrors. The longer you make a solid state laser, the more accurate it would be. Sure your laser pen may fizzle out over great distances, but the solid state component in that laser is like less than a mm wide. You're putting all your money on these theoretical propulsion systems, but yet you think optics have come as far as they ever will. Powerful optics are the key to communicating with the spacecraft over light-year distances. "Sooner or later, the reactor becomes more effective." Not unless your reactor runs continuously for many years. If you could run an electric propulsion system with 100% efficiency you would still be limited by your onboard propellant. You apparently don't realize how much of a burden this is. "A solar sail can't make course corrections in interstellar space, either. At 600,000 mph chemical thrusters would have to be insanely massive to make a difference, so nuclear is the only option." Yes they can make course corrections by tilting the sail, and there is also room for error when they arrive at the destination. In contrast, a reactionary propulsion system would have to spend valuable fuel to make any correction, the tolerance for error would need to be included in the weight of the spacecraft, as extra fuel. The structure of the universe is perfect for solar sails. If your house had a huge jet of air coming from it that could give you the momentum you need to sail through the air to work every day, and vice versa, I think you would abandon your car. You know, Larry Niven came up with the concept of a "ramdrive" spacecraft, which captures interstellar hydrogen with a giant magnetic trap, and expels that out the back of the spacecraft. I think something like that may have the potential to compete with sailed spacecraft, assuming there is significant quantities of interstellar hydrogen. I hope I've opened your eyes to the potential of these spacecraft.
Nah! More energy could be gotten by putting Brittney Spears in the engine space. Her
oscillations would easily best them all at energy output!
Impossible politically....that is until the Peoples Republic of China launches one and defies the world to say anything. Iran has shown the world the will and the way. Just cut off the supply of something in great need by useless parasites with a penchant for hypocritically pedantic faux morality. While the lambs of the so called civilized world bleat nuclear pollution whilst having done nothing to develope this technology themselsves, the Chinese will launch more of them. They will then tell these preachers that the rocket is not polluting, reminding them that the continued profitability of the world's Wal-Marts and chains like them that profiteer on Chinese factory slave labor (to the extent that their own factories are no longer operable and the machinery gone to China) will depend on their and their governments quietly acquiescence or be cut off from continued supply to the benefit of their more compliant competitors in other nations.
That argument will not work on other high population, low cost (ie-slave labor) states like India. Oh yesss, the 'proper term, sanitized for 'politically correctness' for the common overbathed and soon to be no longer pampered populations of so called 'first world' countries------is 'outsourced'. These countries, like India, neighbor to China will realize the threat and already be working on their own models. India, the oldest civilization in the world, has already had an industrial revolution in the dim past over 9000 years ago according to the 'Rig Vedas', the oldest books in the world. They know that something powered the 'Vimanas' mentioned in the Vedas. They think that it was muon catalized cold fusion in highly elastic media subjected to pressure and untrasonic waves. These Alfen waves may prove usefull to those studying this as well.
When the allies entered the Nazi rocket facilities and interviewed the engineers found there, they asked them where and who came up with the idea for the V-2 rocket. They answered: "Many years ago in the 1920's, YOUR scientist, Goddard, wrote a book about liquid rocket propulsion. We READ that book! DID YOU!!!!?".