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Engine in development could cut Mars travel time to three months
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Fusion reactor would use deuterium and lithium-6 crystals.
Humanity has been in space for a while, but we really haven't managed to go very far. Carl Sagan once said that "the surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean, and recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep"—that was in 1980, and we haven't risked testing the water any deeper since then.
One of the main reasons for that, though, is that space is so frustratingly massive. Voyager 1 is the fastest man-made thing ever, but 17 kilometers per second is a tiny fraction of the speed of light. Even getting to one of our nearest neighbors, Mars, would take six to eight months using conventional spaceship engines. Ideas like warp drives are still theoretical, and unlikely to be seen within our lifetimes. However, it might be possible to cut that trip to Mars down to as few as three months using a form of fusion fuel—"dilithium crystals." Yep, just like Star Trek.
It's not quite the same, of course. In the sci-fi series, the crystals are a rare substance that the crew spend an inordinate amount of time searching for, and their engines can use it to travel faster than the speed of light. This engine, currently under development at the University of Hunstville by a team working in collaboration with Boeing, NASA and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, would by comparison be about twice as fast as the best current technology.
According to Txchnologist, General Electric's online tech magazine, this fusion reactor would be fueled by "a few tons" of deuterium (a heavy isotope of hydrogen) and lithium-6 (a stable molecule of lithium) in a crystalline structure‚ hence the "dilithium crystal" claim. Technically, dilithium is a molecule with two covalently bonded lithium atoms, while lithium-6 features six bonded atoms, but we can forgive them for the temptation of using a little poetic license. When the deuterium and the lithium-6 are forced together under high pressure they undergo a fusion reaction—a process which they're still trying to turn into a net producer of energy. While fusion isn't yet a viable fuel source, recent developments in the field seem to indicate that we can't be far away.
The engine, dubbed the "Charger-1 Pulsed Power Generator", would be constructed in space along with the rest of the spaceship to avoid the tricky engineering difficulties of getting all that delicate fusion equipment up through the atmosphere—just like the International Space Station. Once ready, the reactor would be engaged, and millions of amps are passed through super-thin lithium wires in 100 nanosecond pulses—this could generate up to three terawatts of power. Those wires vaporize into plasma, which is collapsed onto the core of deuterium and lithium-6, inducing a fusion reaction.
The energy from that would be forced out the back of the ship in a so-called "z-pinch" using a "magnetic nozzle," a component which the team are also developing. The engine's potential top speed? Over 100,000 km/h. That's roughly the same speed at which the Earth orbits the Sun.
Read more [link to arstechnica.com]
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