NASA wants to shorten the
journey to Mars.
It took about eight months for
its Mars rover, Curiosity, to reach the red planet. And now, the US space
agency is looking for ways to cut the travel time for future manned missions there.
Researchers in Washington State
say that might be possible through a unique manipulation of nuclear fusion, the
same energy that powers the sun and stars.
Scientists at the University of
Washington and at MSNW, a Redmond, Washington, space propulsion company, have
joined forces to build components of a fusion-powered rocket which
could make deep space travel easier, faster and cheaper, with fewer potential
health risks.
“Using existing rocket fuels,
it’s nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth,” said John
Slough, a UW associate professor and president of MSNW. “We are hoping to give
us a much more powerful source of energy in space that could eventually lead to
making interplanetary travel commonplace.”
Slough said his team has already
calculated the possibilities of 30 and 90-day expeditions to Mars using a
rocket powered by fusion. Not only would the trip be quicker, but it would also
be more practical and less costly, according the research team.
Each portion of the process has
proven successful in lab tests, but Slough said researchers still need to
combine each of those isolated tests into a final experiment that will produce
fusion using the newly developed technology.
The team has developed a type of
plasma that is encased in its own magnetic field. Compressing the plasma
to high pressure with its magnetic field should produce nuclear fusion,
according to the research team.
The scientists hope to power a
rocket using the powerful magnetic fields to implode large metal rings
surrounding the plasma to compress it into a fusion state. The collapsing
rings will then come together to form a shell that will ignite the fusion.
While the compression time will
only last for a few microseconds, enough energy will be released to quickly
heat and ionize the shell. The shell’s now super-heated and ionized metal
will be forced out of a rocket nozzle at a high velocity. Repeating that
process every minute or so will propel the spacecraft, according to the
researchers.
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Only a small amount of fusion is
needed to power a rocket, according the researchers. A small grain of fusion
material has the same energy content as several liters of rocket fuel.
“I think everybody was pleased
to see confirmation of the principal mechanism that we’re using to compress the
plasma,” Slough said. “We hope we can interest the world with the fact that
fusion isn’t always 40 years away and doesn’t always cost $2 billion.”
Slough says he hopes to have all
the elements of his team’s new process ready for a first test at the end of the
summer.
Sources :
http://blogs.voanews.com/science-world/2013/04/09/nasa-looks-to-speed-up-journey-to-mars/
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