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New Engine Raises Possibility of Cheap Travel To the Moon
shreshtha writes with this intriguing bit from The Daily Mail: "A tiny satellite thruster which can journey to the Moon on just a tenth of a litre of fuel could usher in a new low-cost space age, its creators hope. The mini-motor weights just a few hundred grams and runs on an ionic chemical compound, using electricity to expel ions and generate thrust. The tiny motor isn't built to blast satellites into orbit — instead, it's to help spacecraft manouevre once they're in space, which previously required bulky, expensive engines."
To whom shall I write the check as I securely invest my life savings?
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
I was under the impression that fuel to get to the moon isn't a major issue, if you can launch a few years before you need to be there. There's (almost) no friction to stop you...
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Seriously, I can travel to the Moon with no fuel if I start in the right position with the right momentum. TFA doesn't tell us much unless the secrets are hidden in the video I'm blocking on the bottom of the page.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Who would have guessed this got posted by Timothy!
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
If this were news for nerds, maybe someone would have researched this before posting?
Forget it, Jake. It's Slashdot.
Dog is my co-pilot.
The new thruster has nothing to do with getting to the moon or even getting into space. It's a way for a small satellite to maneuver once it is in orbit. It could possibly be used for getting into lunar orbit from low earth orbit, but its intended purpose right now is to help clean up debris.
Ion thrusters have been around for a long time; NASA and the ESA have been using them for over a decade.
The fortune at the bottom of the page in which I'm posting says:
But evidently Timothy doesn't read to the bottom of the page, either.
--
make install -not war
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Ion
It's a great site which details (with lots of math) the various problems with space travel.
is launching to space from earth/moon surface. Traveling once there, and landing (at least in earth) could be relatively inexpensive. But once the space elevator, space fountain or other approaches are built and gives us relatively cheap ways to reach space, this kind of approachs could make a difference.
Be sure to bring enough food to last the appreciably longer trip.
Cranky educator.
As others have noted, this is only "new" in the sense that they've made a prototype of a particular design. There's no new technology from what I can see. Ion engines have always been well suited for any mission that can be performed with tiny amounts of thrust over a long period, and it's not surprising you can plot a very-low-thrust course that can get you to the moon if you have plenty of time.
I still have my doubts about microsatellites. There are fixed costs to launching satellites regardless of size. Granted, you can launch oodles of them at once, but for that to be a good idea you need to have thought up a bunch of worthwhile experiments. If you have to pad it out with high school ant farms you may as well have built a bigger and more capable probe.
Deja'Vu
http://science.slashdot.org/story/06/01/15/0149227/new-ion-engine-being-tested
and that is not the big issue, as getting off the ground is always the big expense, but we all know that. This tech can be useful in reducing weight costs for sub orbital payloads though, and probably resembles the design of a DS4G engine. The problem with efficiency in the past is that motors required high voltages to accelerate the ions that collided with the electric field grids. DS4G used a two stage four line grid with the top grid closely spaced and of higher voltage, with an open spaced lower voltage bottom grid. These differences between these stages allow higher velocity without ion grid collision at overall lower voltages resulting in 4x the fuel efficiency of previous engines.
Ion thrusters are not new Have been used for decades to do attitude correction on satellites and have been the primary propulsion for a couple probes to the outer edge of the solar system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_1
The story at the link asks if this is available for cars. Yes! it is! and your car will travel just as fast as if you got out and blew on the back of it!
So if these things are so damn efficient but also weak, would it make sense to move big structures with a whole giant slew of these thrusters? Or do they individually scale up? How much fuel would it take to move something of the mass of the ISS into Martian orbit? That would be traveling in style!
Sorry, but no mass means just traveling at light speed. Faster-than-light needs imaginary mass.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Is biggest expense of fuel i bet.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...the war draws nearer...
Parent link is bad. Try this:
http://lmts.epfl.ch/microthrust
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
There are many good reasons I use Kitten Block, and this article is an example of one of them. A Daily Mail article about science goes like this:
EXTRAVAGANT, SENSATIONALIST CLAIM WHICH HIGHLIGHTS OUR IGNORANCE
Some boffins somewhere did something frightfully clever, which we didn't understand in the slightest. As we can safely assume that, as a Daily Mail reader, you are completely uneducated, we're pretty safe assuming you wouldn't understand it either. A rocket was mentioned, though, and all we could think about was the Jetsons, so that's what's going to happen. And it will cure cancer.
We can build our Moon Base for super-cheap with exported Mexican labor!
NEWT!!! NEWT!!! NEWT!!! NEWT!!! NEWT!!! NEWT!!!
since the last hopelessly naive, wildly over-optimistic, foaming-at-the-mouth delirious Space Nutter story. Pathetic.
How big would this thing need to be to get a human being to the moon in under a week?
According to slashdot this article was posted April 1... I'm not buying it.
It still seems like you're conflating "fuel" and "propellant". You're using 100ml of propellant, but accelerating it using an energy source external to that 200g budget, right?
This is still a big deal, since even small satellites can deploy significant solar panels, but it seems like you'll avoid a lot of arguments and criticism by clarifying this point up front.
And, as another poster said, thanks for participating in this discussion!
its getting there that’s not
Great, now when I start to feel like perhaps my GPS device is taking me to the moon on the way to downtown, it actually might be. Though, how settling it is to know that next time I'm golfing on the moon, they could have an array of GPS satellites in orbit that will tell me where the next hole is. It really all starts to look the same up there after a while.
But seriously, what is there to do with satellites around the moon? Certainly something less useful than around Earth. Still neat though.
I have a similar engine, utilizing digestive products of leguminous vegetables.
This sounds very similar to Digital Solid State Propulsion, a states-side company that has been testing electrically-fired chemical microthrusters for at least the last several years. The DSSP thrusters (at least the ones I've seen so far) ranged from about the size of a .22 shell casing to an "AA" battery, and produce a controlled jet of ionized gas when electricity is applied (a gelled fuel inside is slowly consumed in the process). They're intended for propulsion and micropositioning (e.g. long-term station-keeping) on small satellites... although there are probably other sizes for other applications.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.