Thruster May Shorten Mars Trip – www.photonics.com: An amplified photon thruster that could potentially shorten the trip to Mars from six months to a week has reportedly attracted the attention of aerospace agencies and contractors.
Young Bae, founder of the Bae Institute in Tustin, Calif., first demonstrated his photonic laser thruster (PLT), which he built with off-the-shelf components, in December.
The demonstration produced a photon thrust of 35 µN and is scalable to achieve much greater thrust for future space missions, the institute said. Applications include highly precise satellite formation flying configurations for building large synthetic apertures in space for earth or space observation, precision contaminant-free spacecraft docking operations, and propelling spacecraft to unprecedented speeds — faster than 100 km/sec.
100 km/sec = 360,000 kph = 223,634 mph
Thursters, haha
Its NOT how fast you can GO, its HOW fast you can SLOW DOWN.
EVEn a ship pushing 1 g AT ALL times, to mars, will have to rotate, and do AT LEAST 1 g of force to slow down…
1g, is an interesting thing. Its an increasing force. AS the body catches up with the Speed, the force is increased…to KEEP the 1 G… Once you TOP out of speed, your body will start to float…
BUT then is the fun part of ROOMS as you reverse the force to slow down and create CONSTANT force of 1 G in the opposite direction…Can you see BREAKING at 3-4-5-6 G…for 3-4 days?? NOT worth it.
“100 km/sec = 360.000 kph = 223.634 mph”
You might want to change those periods into commas, the numbers might make some sense then.
Its Star Trek in our generation
#3 – Mike – Hard enough to believe, but there are people from other countries that actually read this blog. In those mysterious countries on the map, past the dragons and the warning “here there be monsters”, they use commas and decimals in the complete opposite of the civilized world.
Therefor they are a threat to the country and we must bomb the crap out of them.
I don’t know, the tech looks a bit fishy. I haven’t seen one single peer-reviewed work. But they did fill out the NASA paperwork and make a bona fide proposal to NASA.
Short form here:
http://tinyurl.com/2qdq83
Sounds good – 35 micro newtons of thrust per watt is impressive. Even though a novel idea, the chances of this working outside of a laboratory seem relatively small.
A thruster that uses photons? I’ll believe it when I see it.
can I use it to power my house??
would be cool as a generator..
Most here will never see this. NASA is so slow, that even if this thing worked, NASA would test the hell out of it for 20-30 years before it ever got used. How long has the ion drive been out and it only has been deployed on one test space probe.
To date, there have been six probes launched with ion propulsion of one design or another. Best example is Deep Space 1 with a 2,100 watt ion engine. If a probe can be accelerated at milligravities constantly, extremely high velocities can be achieved.
The engine:
http://nmp.nasa.gov/ds1/img/p49722bc.gif
DS-1 NASA website:
http://nmp.nasa.gov/ds1/
STAR TREK RULES!!! WHERE THE HELL ARE YOUR LIGHT SABERS STAR WARS BEYOTCHES?
But can it play Doom?
the ion engine has been having problems…ONLY 1..
as it speeds up it catches to many ions and it plugs up.
Some how this seems to harbinger greater things or if not it stil sounds cool.
Only problem is with TESTING…
With any of these we are at the lenancy of NASA…And if they can get it up.
i have no problem believing this.. there are MANY things, dreams, if you will, that are already, or have been in use for years and even decades that the public is not privy to.
in physics and medicine, we already have devices that put out many times more energy than is put in, as well as ability to pretty much eliminate all organism based disease/bugs from the body and allow one to live an almost disease free life.
the problem is that the solutions have been suppressed and are way to cheap to implement as well as threaten to literally bankrupt the heavily entrenched mega-to the-power-of-10 buck nations, industries and corporations out of existence.
-they will not let go of their long standing monopolies & cartels without a bloody fight to the death.
we (esp the USA ) and others are so hung up (and used to) on monetary profit above all else , that “the powers that be” will attempt to buy out any new tech so it can be sat on and shelved until the current forms of usage are pretty much exhausted first. -and then some.
not to knock it…I love making the bucks as much as the next guy, but to do so at the extreme expense of making life easier and/or cheaper for all is just plain overwhelming and arrogant greed, ignorance and stupidity.
unfortunately the only way out i see is to some how eliminate the whole concept of currency and monetary systems as well as the idea of “profit”. And we’ll all know pigs will fly and teach high schoolers calculus before that happens.
i think it’s also safe to say that every government on this planet is far to entrenched with corruption and self-serving egotistical goals to ever lead any one peoples to a “healthy” technological future. -whatever the F that is..
probably the only real recourse would be the ever popular “catastrophe of biblical proportions” that forces humans on whole as a race to take stock in their future and realize on the whole, the habits that held us back from advancing as a species.
i say this as only as a side note.
i’m a born and raised jaded NYorker, and not some peace loving, tree humping misguided green loving, political whoring, bible thumping religious fanatic.
-just someone with some decent common sense.
thems is simply the facts. as to how it all plays out…i’m still on the fence as to whether i’d even want to live to see it through to fruition… its gonna be one HELL of a bumpy ride.
..and i have a bad back.
-soundwash
I looked at the online documents. This doesn’t work as people imagine. This is not an isolated ‘optical rocket engine’. This is not a pure optical drive system where light shot out the end pushes the ship.
Instead, two free laser mirrors bounce the beam back and forth, with amplifier material between them (see LASER theory). The transferred photon momentum pushing them apart. No problem. More bounces of the light produce more momentum transfer. But in keeping with Newton and Galilleo your rocket needs a remote mirror to push against. So the ‘ship’ can be driven from Earth with a ground based laser station (if it doesn’t blind us) but there needs to be a remote laser and mirror to slow the ship down, otherwise it is a one way ‘flyby’ only, without orbital capture unless you do a red hot atmospheric deceleration. Should be fun.
Still, I could imagine sending ‘lander’ rocket first with a fold out laser mirror arrangement, to be used to ‘catch’ the payloads we push away from the Earth.