Plasma engine passes initial test

The European Space Agency (Esa) says initial testing of a new plasma drive for spacecraft has been a success.

The 'double layer thruster' is a new kind of ion drive which could give much more power than existing versions.

It works by accelerating charged particles between two layers of argon plasma, gas where the atoms have been stripped of electrons.

Esa says it has 'proven the principle', and will proceed with simulations and perhaps bigger prototypes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4527696.stm

Good to be making progress on deep space exploration and future travel. The Europeans are in high gear while we still screw around with the stupid-ass space shuttle.

we don't need to go to heaven with new rockets. Jeebiz is coming soon and will take us up in hiz glory. What we need is to teach intelligent design and to get gawdfearing christian prayer in our schools so more of our chilluns will be born again in time to be Raptured.

Puh-raze Jeezis.

:sarcasm:

to bad NASA is not doing much in this area.

Have you forgotten Deep Space One? That was the first test in outer space of an ion drive; it worked fine.

one that I think is pretty neat is the m2p2. It's like a solar sail, only the sail is a magneticly confined plasma. As the solar wind decreases in strenth, the "sail" gets bigger, so that the force on the ship is roughly constant.

More info on it as well as the high power helicon here:

http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/propulsion.html

What happened to the NASA of the 50s and 60s?

disclaimer in form of quotation: "It's what's called a joke, I'll be telling a lot of them here tonight." -David Cross

I'm not at all scientifically hip, forgive me if this is a stupid question:

They note they're going to possibly 'proceed .. with bigger prototypes' ... can something like this be used on SMALLER prototypes - say, Jet engines ? Diesel engines ? Train engines ?

IE ~ Could something like this be used to decrease fuel dependency for our 'mass transit/transport' industries ?

This kind of plasma drive is NOT suitable for earth use, for a simple reason: An ion drive has an extremely low thrust value, and is designed to operate continuously for months at a time.

Deep Space One had a thrust value which was about the same as the weight of a sheet of paper. But you could run its engine for a VERY long time.

but also has an extremely poor power-to-weight (and poor power-to-volume) ratio.

The high fuel efficiency is in part due to the fact that much of the energy needed for operation is drawn from solar panels.

This new ion drive is an interesting development.

What would YOU rather our country be good at, anyway, science and math or FOOTBALL?

:sarcasm:

Macho 'Murkan He-Men like football. Brains are for sissies. :eyes:

Ryan Fitzpatrick would probably take huge exception to that. Seeing as he went to Harvard where they don't get a scholarship for football and being good at football doesn't make getting accepted any easier. And there have been other Ive Leaguers playing pro football. Plus it's not like schools like Stanford and Rutgers are for academic slouches. Oh and until it was disbanded the most feared football program in the country was at the U of Chicago. What's that about football players and knuckledraggers?

first off, while Ivies don't give athletic scholarships, they DO recruit for atheletes, and it does increase your chances of getting in to be recruited, by any sport.

and Chicago now plays division III football, not exactly powerful stuff that (I went to a Div III school, and played two sports there, so I know a bit about it)

and third, you aren't really comparing Rutgers and Stanford as undergraduate programs, are you? Rutgers is a fine school, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Rutgers accepts 55% of applicants, Stanford accepts 15%. 93% of incoming freshmen graduate Stanford within 5 years. Rutgers is not even in the top 100 nationally (the cut off is 72%)

lastly, there is little to no connection between academic excellence and success in NCAA football. For what it's worth, here are the US News rankings for the top 25 Universities in the US:

1 Harvard University (MA)
1 Princeton University (NJ)
3 Yale University (CT)
4 University of Pennsylvania
5 Duke University (NC)
5 Stanford University (CA)
7 California Institute of Technology
7 Massachusetts Inst. of Technology
9 Columbia University (NY)
9 Dartmouth College (NH)
11 Washington University in St. Louis
12 Northwestern University (IL)
13 Cornell University (NY)
13 Johns Hopkins University (MD)
15 Brown University (RI)
15 University of Chicago
17 Rice University (TX)
18 University of Notre Dame (IN)
18 Vanderbilt University (TN)
20 Emory University (GA)
20 University of California – Berkeley*
22 Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
23 Georgetown University (DC)
23 University of Virginia*
25 Univ. of California – Los Angeles*
25 University of Michigan – Ann Arbor*

I see four schools that were, for at least one week, ranked in the polls this year in Div I Football. Michigan, UCLA, Notre Dame, UVA. At times, Berkeley and Stanford have been ranked in the past decade. That's it.

I would rather pay more taxes for science and quality science instruction, but that does not mean I am hostile to recreational sports Who's with me??

but I sorta like my football, too.

:shrug:

take quite a few engineers to build, especially structural engineers. Nevermind in Europe they have as many stadiums as the US does. There's how many pro soccer teams in and around London alone? And then there's rugby and cricket, nevermind that colossus of a tennis stadium where they play Wimbledon. Plus where in the US is there a stadium just for track and field? In Europe more people will show up for a track meet than people show up for a football game in the US. Nevermind how big some track athletes are over there, including Americans, who can't even get their name in the paper in the US most of the time. Let's not pretend Americans are any more into sports than Europeans are. Indeed in some ways, they're less so.

They should call it a Satan Motor.

I only approve of intelligent designed engines made by Gawd...ya know horses and buggies and Mustang GT's.

Europe is going to hell using that non-faith based science. It's Gawdless.

who gets high thrust plasma engines working first. Something suitable for a mission to Mars owing to the high thrust and thus acceleration. Of course once someone figures out the technical issues in producing large quantities of anti-matter it's all moot. Matter anti-matter engines will eat everything else for lunch.

The matter/anti-matter concept we all know and love from Star Trek
was an energy storage mechanism and one that probably can't be
beat, so far as we know today; it's far better than any chemical
or nuclear reaction we're currently aware of.

But the plasma drive is a way to *USE* that energy to produce
thrust, kinda like the Enterprise used the energy released from
the matter/anti-matter anhiliation to power the warp drive.

Tesha