New Test Suggests NASA's "Impossible" EM Drive Will Work In Space

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ChrisW

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http://io9.com/new-test-suggests-nasas-impossible-em-drive-will-work-1701188933


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Last year, NASA’s advanced propulsion research wing made headlines by announcing thesuccessful test of a physics-defying electromagnetic drive, or EM drive. Now, this futuristic engine, which could in theory propel objects to near-relativistic speeds, has been shown to work inside a space-like vacuum.


NASA: New "impossible" engine works, could change space travel forever
Until yesterday, every physicist was laughing at this engine and its inventor, Roger Shawyer.…Read more sploid.gizmodo.com

Illustration: “Dreamscape IV,” by jamajurabaev, via Deviantart
NASA Eagleworks made the announcement quite unassumingly viaNASASpaceFlight.com. There’s also a major discussion going on about the engine and the physics that drives it at the site’s forum.

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COMSOL Magnetic Field Surface Distribution (NASA Eagleworks).
The EM drive is controversial in that it appears to violate conventional physics and the law of conservation of momentum; the engine, invented by British scientist Roger Sawyer,converts electric power to thrust without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves within a closed container. So, with no expulsion of propellant, there’s nothing to balance the change in the spacecraft’s momentum during acceleration. Hence the skepticism. But as stated by NASA Eagleworks scientist Harold White:

[T]he EM Drive’s thrust was due to the Quantum Vacuum (the quantum state with the lowest possible energy) behaving like propellant ions behave in a MagnetoHydroDynamics drive (a method electrifying propellant and then directing it with magnetic fields to push a spacecraft in the opposite direction) for spacecraft propulsion.

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The trouble with this theory, however, is that it might not work in a closed vacuum. After last year’s tests of the engine, which weren’t performed in a vacuum, skeptics argued that the measured thrust was attributable to environmental conditions external to the drive, such as natural thermal convection currents arising from microwave heating.

The recent experiment, however, addressed this concern head-on, while also demonstrating the engine’s potential to work in space. (Image: NASA Eagleworks.)

The NASASpaceflight.com group has given consideration to whether the experimental measurements of thrust force were the result of an artifact. Despite considerable effort within the NASASpaceflight.com forum to dismiss the reported thrust as an artifact, the EM Drive results have yet to be falsified.

After consistent reports of thrust measurements from EM Drive experiments in the US, UK, and China – at thrust levels several thousand times in excess of a photon rocket, and now under hard vacuum conditions – the question of where the thrust is coming from deserves serious inquiry.

Serious inquiry, indeed. It’s crucial now that these tests be analyzed, replicated, and confirmed elsewhere. A peer-review and formal paper would also seem to be in order lest we get too carried away with these results. But wow. Just wow.

Related: Don’t Get Too Excited About NASA’s New Miracle Engine

It’s still early days, but the implications are mind-boggling to say the least. A full-fledged EM drive could be used on everything from satellites working in low Earth orbit, to missions to the Moon, Mars, and the outer solar system.

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EM drives could also be used on multi-generation spaceships for interstellar travel. A journey to Alpha Centauri, which is “just” 4.3 light-years away, suddenly wouldn’t be so daunting. An EM drive working under a constant one milli-g acceleration would propel a ship to about 9.4% the speed of light, resulting in a total travel time of 92 years. But that’s without the need for deceleration; should we wish to make a stop at Alpha Centauri, we’d have to add another 38 years to the trip. Not a big deal by any extent of the imagination.

Much more at NASASpaceFlight.com.
 

bluecoconuts

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Fun thought, but short answer is no, and long answer is nooooooooooooo.


But in all reality, most aren't jumping for joy, we're still quite a ways away. These articles (I've seen a few of them) are jumping the gun way early.
 

ChrisW

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Fun thought, but short answer is no, and long answer is nooooooooooooo.


But in all reality, most aren't jumping for joy, we're still quite a ways away. These articles (I've seen a few of them) are jumping the gun way early.

It's possible, but from what I've heard the funding and political roadblocks will kill it.
 

Mister Sin

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This is pretty damn interesting. Just having this prototype can lead to great advances. Hopefully they can get backed
 

RAMSinLA

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It's possible, but from what I've heard the funding and political roadblocks will kill it.
That is really cool. Speaking of political roadblocks; I know a few dozen politicians that Id like to send on this things maiden voyage towards some black hole or something... :D
 

bluecoconuts

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It's possible, but from what I've heard the funding and political roadblocks will kill it.

In theory it is, but its still quite a ways off. NASA actually has a tracker on their website to follow progress.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warp.html


They believe they know the basics of what they need to do, figuring out exactly how to do it though still needs to get done. There's different experiments that seem to demonstrate the idea is viable, but there needs to be a lot more tests and peer reviews before they even begin to try to build on the technology.
 

Mackeyser

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This is the kind of hard science that needs to be funded. It's not just cool or interesting. It's so beyond what we understand that in our search to verify, we learn so much.

Later, those discoveries become seeds for scientific and technical innovation. Memory foam is the easiest example for most people to understand. We only have it as a result of the Apollo space program.

We may never head to distant stars, but we may mine moons of other planets or even actually build a planetary defense system that means a damn with the capacity to actually move even a very large object off its course enough to miss Earth. (most objects that could create an Extinction Level Event we could do nothing about at this time even if we launched ever nuclear weapon on the planet at it. Many we'd never see due to their composition until either they were very close or even until they approached our atmosphere. Not a very fun thought)

Or, we may find a technology, innovation, service or purpose we haven't even imagined based on a scientific piece of data or principle.

We need pure science now more than ever.
 

LesBaker

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This is the kind of hard science that needs to be funded. It's not just cool or interesting. It's so beyond what we understand that in our search to verify, we learn so much.

Later, those discoveries become seeds for scientific and technical innovation. Memory foam is the easiest example for most people to understand. We only have it as a result of the Apollo space program.

We may never head to distant stars, but we may mine moons of other planets or even actually build a planetary defense system that means a damn with the capacity to actually move even a very large object off its course enough to miss Earth. (most objects that could create an Extinction Level Event we could do nothing about at this time even if we launched ever nuclear weapon on the planet at it. Many we'd never see due to their composition until either they were very close or even until they approached our atmosphere. Not a very fun thought)

Or, we may find a technology, innovation, service or purpose we haven't even imagined based on a scientific piece of data or principle.

We need pure science now more than ever.

Mac sometimes you are at your best when topics like this come up. I couldn't agree more with your opening paragraph, short but dialed right in to the truth and it spells out exactly why this kind of thing should be funded not laughed at.

You never know what can happen and a lot of amazing things have indeed happened "by accident" or were initially some other thing on the periphery that in the moment wasn't viewed as important.

I hope they throw a TON of money at this.