Leaked NASA Paper Suggests The 'Impossible' EM Drive Really Does Work (sciencealert.com)

A source close to NASA Eagleworks has leaked the test results of the 'impossible' EM Drive. While it's important to note that the results that have been leaked haven't been published in an academic journal, they do suggest that the system works and is capable of generating force of 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt in a vacuum. ScienceAlert reports: The paper concludes that, after error measurements have been accounted for, the EM Drive generates force of 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt in a vacuum. That's not an insignificant amount -- to put it into perspective, the super-powerful Hall thruster generates force of 60 millinewtons per kilowatt, an order of magnitude more than the EM Drive. But the Hall thruster uses fuel and requires a spacecraft to carry heavy propellants, and that extra weight could offset the higher thrust, the NASA Eagleworks team conclude in the paper. Light sails on the other hand, which are currently the most popular form of zero-propellant propulsion, use beams of sunlight to propel them forward rather than fuel. And they only generate force up to 6.67 micronewtons per kilowatt - two orders of magnitude less than NASA's EM Drive, says the paper. The NASA Eagleworks team measured the EM Drive's force using a low thrust pendulum at the Johnson Space Centre, and the tests were performed at 40, 60, and 80 watts. They were looking for any sign that the thrust could be a result of another anomaly in the system, but for now, that doesn't appear to be the case. "The test campaign included a null thrust test effort to identify any mundane sources of impulsive thrust, however none were identified," the team, led by Harold White, concluded in the paper. "Thrust data from forward, reverse, and null suggests that the system is consistently performing with a thrust to power ratio of 1.2 +/- 0.1 millinewtons per kilowatt." But the team does acknowledge that more research is needed to eliminate the possibility that thermal expansion could be somehow skewing the results. They also make it clear that this testing wasn't designed to optimize the thrust of the EM Drive, but simply to test whether it worked, so further tweaking could make the propulsion system more efficient and powerful.

Comments

Re: This is interesting

[Frankzy]

It'd make an excellent engine for anything that gets lifted into space and is supposed to stay there for a long time, such as satellites...

Re:Casimir effect

[iris-n]

This is ridiculous. Conservation of momentum is valid in both quantum field theory and general relativity, there are an appropriate versions of Noether's theorem for them. And I don't see why are you harking about the Casimir effect: it doesn't violate conservation of momentum either.

Your suggestion that conservation of momentum might fail because of some fundamental discretization of space is also insane: first of all this is just speculative physics at this stage. Second, everyone that does speculate about it agrees that to probe the existence of this discretization would require particle collisions with energy around the Planck energy, about 10^28 eV. For comparison, the maximum we can do now, in the LHC, is to collide particles with energy of 10^13 eV.

To think that some lame tabletop experiment using only classical electrodynamics, running at most at 80 watts, somehow magically found a way to probe phenomena from an energy scale 15 orders of magnitude larger than the LHC scale, just shows a complete lack of knowledge of all the science involved. At the very least, it would show that the whole particle physics community are complete idiots for spending billions of euros in the LHC, while even more revolutionary science could by done on spare change by Eagleworks.

Re:This is interesting

[BlueStrat]

But its early days yet. We don't really know how it works. If it turns out to be a real thing, then physicists will have to mull it over for a couple of decades before new applications appear.

And if it's real, then once physicists have figured out how it work, they can get busy on increasing its efficiency. Getting to Mars in a week or Titan in a month vastly changes the economics of human expansion through the solar system.

Not quite. A bit of cart-before-horse.

Once there's enough testing done to prove it has potential, then engineers will take it, play with it, improve it, apply it, then sometime later, physicists and other scientists will figure out precisely why it works and why what the engineers did worked.

Strat