That's not how orbits work. After the 32nd orbit, Juno will enter its 33rd orbit. Orbits are inertial, and only require fuel for station-keeping. On this orbit, however, no orbital perturbations will cleverly keep Juno out of the worst of Jupiter's tremendous magnetic fields, which trap cosmic rays, solar wind particles, and other ionizing radiation, and so Juno's electronics will begin to degrade. No longer able to speak to us, Juno will keep orbiting until the orbital trajectory itself begins to degrade and it spirals down into the planet to burn up in the atmosphere.
I can't imagine that there would be monstrous factories of these things all over the universe to account for the stupidly large amount of mass they are supposed to account for.
It turns out there was actually a monstrous factory of these things -- scientists call it the big bang, and it's hard to make in the lab, so we're just getting enough energy together now to make them extremely infrequently.
The problem is the power consumption on this thing. If you assume that they want to move all the air in a small region around the wire even once per second, say 10mm x 1mm x 1cm, to use the dimension quoted in TFA and nominal orders of magnitude for chip size and wire thickness, that corresponds to something ~ 10^-5 moles of air. Since Nitrogen has an ionization energy of 1402.3 kJ/mol (Wikipedia), that means if you want to move that quantity of air every second, you need at least something around 15W. That's even assuming you perfectly convert electrical energy into removing electrons from air molecules, and it's just to ionize the air, neglecting the extra energy it then takes to get the ions moving (we'll pretend the fan does all that, even though that would mean that our device isn't doing jack).
I don't know how much energy my laptop uses, but my power adapter is 65W, so 15 seems non-negligible.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not how orbits work. After the 32nd orbit, Juno will enter its 33rd orbit. Orbits are inertial, and only require fuel for station-keeping. On this orbit, however, no orbital perturbations will cleverly keep Juno out of the worst of Jupiter's tremendous magnetic fields, which trap cosmic rays, solar wind particles, and other ionizing radiation, and so Juno's electronics will begin to degrade. No longer able to speak to us, Juno will keep orbiting until the orbital trajectory itself begins to degrade and it spirals down into the planet to burn up in the atmosphere.
I can't imagine that there would be monstrous factories of these things all over the universe to account for the stupidly large amount of mass they are supposed to account for.
It turns out there was actually a monstrous factory of these things -- scientists call it the big bang, and it's hard to make in the lab, so we're just getting enough energy together now to make them extremely infrequently.
actually my analysis assumed none of the ions were moved at all, just ionized.
The problem is the power consumption on this thing. If you assume that they want to move all the air in a small region around the wire even once per second, say 10mm x 1mm x 1cm, to use the dimension quoted in TFA and nominal orders of magnitude for chip size and wire thickness, that corresponds to something ~ 10^-5 moles of air. Since Nitrogen has an ionization energy of 1402.3 kJ/mol (Wikipedia), that means if you want to move that quantity of air every second, you need at least something around 15W. That's even assuming you perfectly convert electrical energy into removing electrons from air molecules, and it's just to ionize the air, neglecting the extra energy it then takes to get the ions moving (we'll pretend the fan does all that, even though that would mean that our device isn't doing jack).
I don't know how much energy my laptop uses, but my power adapter is 65W, so 15 seems non-negligible.