Mustafa's Space Drive: An Egyptian Student's Quantum Physics Invention. Remember the name, because you might see it again: Aisha Mustafa, a 19-year-old Egyptian physics student, patented a new type of propulsion system for spacecraft that uses cutting edge quantum physics instead of thrusters. First, a little background: One of the strange quantum facts at work in Mustafa's engine idea is that there's no such thing as a vacuum, devoid of particles, waves, and energy. Instead the universe's supposedly empty spaces are filled with a roiling sea of particles and anti-particles that pop into existence, then annihilate each other in such a short space of time that you can't readily detect them.
Mustafa invented a way of tapping this quantum effect via what's known as the dynamic Casimir effect. This uses a "moving mirror" cavity, where two very reflective very flat plates are held close together, and then moved slightly to interact with the quantum particle sea. In terms of space propulsion, this is amazing. [Image: Flickr user gordontarpley] NASA’s NEXT ion drive breaks world record, will eventually power interplanetary missions. Proving yet again that Star Trek was scarily prescient, NASA has announced that its NEXT ion drive — NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster — has operated continually for over 43,000 hours (five years). This is an important development, as ion thrusters are pegged as one of the best ways to power long-term deep-space missions to other planets and solar systems.
With a proven life time of at least five years, NEXT engines just made a very big step towards powering NASA’s next-gen spacecraft. Ion thrusters work, as the name suggests, by firing ions (charged atoms or molecules) out of a nozzle at high speed (pictured above). In the case of NEXT, operation is fairly simple. Xenon (a noble gas) is squirted into a chamber. An electron gun (think cathode ray tube TV) fires electrons at the xenon atoms, creating a plasma of negative and positive ions. A diagram of an electrostatic ion thruster (as in NASA’s NEXT, and most other ion thrusters) [Image credit] Russia Proposes Nuclear Space Propulsion Breakthrough. In 2009 Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (center) called for resources to build a nuclear-powered spaceship (Credits: RIA Novosti/AP). Russia plans to develop a nuclear propulsion system that will be available in 2017, and will be capable of supporting interplanetary missions by 2025.
According to the executive director of the Nuclear Technologies Cluster at Skolkovo Russia, Denis Kovalech: “At present we are testing several types of fuel and later we will start drafting the design.” If Russia is able to harness nuclear energy to power long duration space missions by 2025, it would give them a significant lead in the modern space race. Nuclear energy has significant advantages for deep space missions, in which the ability to carry fuel is a limiting factor in determining a mission’s duration. Nuclear energy can be used in two ways in powering propulsion systems: either its energy can be used to generate heat that is turned into energy or it may provide power directly.
Nuclear Reactors for Space. (Updated December 2013) Radioisotope power sources have been an important source of energy in space since 1961.Fission power sources have been used mainly by Russia, but new and more powerful designs are under development in the USA. After a gap of several years, there is a revival of interest in the use of nuclear fission power for space missions. While Russia has used over 30 fission reactors in space, the USA has flown only one - the SNAP-10A (System for Nuclear Auxiliary Power) in 1965. Early on, from 1959-73 there was a US nuclear rocket program – Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications (NERVA) – which was focused on nuclear power replacing chemical rockets for the latter stages of launches.
Another early idea was the US Project Orion, which would launch a substantial spacecraft - about 1000 tonnes - from the earth using a series of small nuclear explosions to propel it. Radioisotope systems – RTGs The latest RTG is a 290-watt system known as the GPHS RTG. Fission systems – heat. NASA working on faster-than-light space travel, says warp drives are ‘plausible’ Trekkies rejoice: while real breakthroughs in warp drive design haven’t happened yet, we’re moving closer to making faster-than-light travel truly feasible. Researchers found that making adjustments to the design of a real-life warp drive first proposed by physicist Michael Alcubierre in 1994 significantly reduces the amount of energy required to power it. Alcubierre’s design called for an American football-shaped spacecraft with a flat ring attached to the ship. Space time would warp around it, accelerating the ship to as fast as 10 times the speed of light without the ship itself ever breaking the speed of light.
This would make trips to local stars a relatively quick jaunt: a trip to Alpha Centauri — some four light years away from Earth — would take just shy of five months. Up until now, the biggest problem was that the Alcubierre warp drive required prohibitive amounts of energy to power it. Dr. Here’s the thing though: antimatter is horribly dangerous.
Microthruster ion drive gives tiny satellites a boost. Small-scale satellites show a lot promise, but unless they have equally small-scale thrusters they’re pretty limited in what they can do. Unfortunately conventional thrusters are heavy and take up a lot of valuable space, but a penny-sized rocket engine developed at MIT holds the prospect of not only increasing the capabilities of miniature satellites, but of combating space junk as well. View all Cubesats are a class of nanosatellites. Unlike most satellites, which weigh in at several tons and can be as big as a bus, cubesats are, as the name implies, tiny cubes only four inches (10.16 cm) on a side and weighing about three pounds (1.36 kg). They’re attractive to space engineers and scientist because they’re small enough to be launched as hitchhikers with larger payloads and they can be used either singly, flown in formation or docked together like building blocks to form a bigger satellite.
To test the thrusters, the MIT team had to employ a novel apparatus. Source: MIT. Alcubierre drive. Two-dimensional visualization of the Alcubierre drive, showing the opposing regions of expanding and contracting spacetime that displace the central region. The Alcubierre drive or Alcubierre metric (referring to metric tensor) is a speculative idea based on a solution of Einstein's field equations in general relativity as proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, by which a spacecraft could achieve faster-than-light travel if a configurable energy-density field lower than that of vacuum (i.e. negative mass) could be created.
Rather than exceeding the speed of light within its local frame of reference, a spacecraft would traverse distances by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, resulting in effective faster-than-light travel. History[edit] Alcubierre metric[edit] The Alcubierre metric defines the warp-drive spacetime. Mathematics of the Alcubierre drive[edit] where is a positive definite metric on each of the hypersurfaces. and with arbitrary parameters . How NASA might build its very first warp drive. I want to see this work as much as anyone else on io9, but every time I read an article on warp drive, I expend so much mental energy trying to wrap my head around the concept that my entire left hand side goes numb. Somewhere along the line my understanding of concepts such as the nature of Spacetime is deficient. Here's the problem. When I think about the idea of expanding the conceptual framework that describes the continuum between two abstract concepts, behind a spaceship, whilst contracting the conceptual framework that describes the continuum between two abstract concepts, in front of a spaceship; all I can think of is that this like saying that when in conversation with another person, I can reach out with my hand, grasp hold of the words that are coming out of that other persons mouth and fold them in half.
If someone could point me towards some legible books that I could buy that would help me understand where my understanding has gone wrong, I would be grateful. Thanks.