A new type of rocket that could send humans to Mars in less than six weeks instead of six months or longer may be one step closer to reality.
NASA has selected Texas-based Ad Astra Rocket Company for a round of funding to help develop the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, or VASIMR. The new rocket uses plasma and magnets, not to lift spacecraft into orbit but to propel them further and faster once they've escaped the planet's atmosphere.
“It is a rocket like no other rocket that you might have seen in the past. It is a plasma rocket," Dr. Franklin Chang-Díaz, a former shuttle astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra said in a video describing the rocket. "The VASIMR engine is not used for launching things into space or landing them back but rather it is used for things already there. We call this ‘in-space propulsion.'"
If you're looking at Mars tonight, try doing some analysis on the Amazonis region of the Red Planet. It is understood to be the youngest region in Mars. Do you know that all the Water from Mars probably evaporated into Space. Mars like Earth, probably got their water from Comets and Asteroids hitting the polar caps. Do you believe that our water here on earth is also destined to evaporate into Space?
Originally posted by Lagrangian Do you believe that our water here on earth is also destined to evaporate into Space?
Well sure. When the Sun swells real big, it's gonna' cook everything off to a crisp.
Lagrangian
I love you Bill but you're wrong
Lagrangian
First consideration
The craft is a magnetic field exclusion device. This is extremely important because that is the source of lift. We know that this can be achieved from our experience with a block of super conducting material. It follows that a skin of superconducting material will exclude external magnetic fields. From then on, the engineering is about craft density and both the sphere and the flattened disc optimize craft density. Thus observation is confirming the nature of the source of lift and no new physics is called for.
We now know that a first prerequisite must be a skin containing a laminar layer of superconducting material. This also infers an adjoining layer, both under and over that is magnetic solid state refrigeration (SSR). We can assume for now that each layer is a few atoms thick. Powering this up will exclude the ambient magnetic field and provide ferocious lift on the Earth's surface.
The new research involved a lanthanum copper oxide compound that can be doped over a wide range of compositions, which was used to study a potentially new mechanism of superconduction. A substrate of LaSrCuO4 was used, and an epitaxy technique grew atomically-perfect thin films of three derivative compounds: an insulator and a metal that show no superconductivity, and a superconducting variant with a transition temperature (Tc) of 40K. By growing literally hundreds of combination of interfaces and film thicknesses, the researchers were able to observe superconduction at different temperatures, including superconduction at the metal/insulator interface.
While there is no definitive explanation available for this interfacial superconduction, it opens the door for further research into engineering superconductors out of non-superconducting materials. The small length scales at which the superconduction occurs may make it appropriate for micro- and nanoscale devices.
Nature 455, 782-785 (9 October 2008) doi:10.1038/nature07293; Received 15 June 2007; Accepted 25 July 2008, "High-temperature interface superconductivity between metallic and insulating copper oxides."
This first discloses that we are working on the problem at the atomic layer level which is surely what the idea of a working skin implies. It also suggests that a working layer need only be a couple of atoms thick. This makes the cooling task far more tractable.
Beautiful Night Tonight. The Stars have indeed aligned in our favor.
In God We Trust.
Lagrangian
Lagrangian
Lagrangian
With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the sun’s blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before.
This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. The mosaic images were acquired as the spacecraft drifted in the darkness of Saturn’s shadow for about 12 hours, allowing a multitude of unique observations of the microscopic particles that comprise Saturn’s faint rings.
The narrowly confined G ring is easily seen here, outside the bright main rings. Encircling the entire system is the much more extended E ring. The icy plumes of Enceladus, whose eruptions supply the E ring particles, betray the moon’s position in the E ring’s left side edge.
Interior to the G ring and above the brighter main rings is the pale dot of Earth. Cassini views its point of origin from close to a billion miles away in the icy depths of the outer solar system.
