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Have we invented a warp drive?
9 years ago
General
"Warp factor 1. Mr. Sulu."
Thus Captain James T. Kirk would send the Enterprise off on another adventure in the old Star Trek television series. (I'm ignoring the new movies...heh!) The key to traveling the vast distances in outer space was, of course, the fictional warp drive that bent space around the ship (warped it) and propelled the ship forward. The warp drive engines moved the ship without actually ejecting any mass, what is known in science as a reactionless drive.
Well, NASA just published a peer reviewed paper on the EM (for ElectroMagnetic) drive, a reactionless drive that shouldn't work...but appears that it does, much to the chagrin of many physicists. Now the peer review doesn't guarantee the EM drive actually works, but it means other scientists have looked at the experimental setup, the results, and the conclusions and found them to be reasonable within the realms of science.
One of the founding building blocks of physics as we know it is Newton's Third Law, which states "For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction." It's the standard that our current rocket technology is based on. You burn a highly volatile fuel and force it out the back of the rocket, pushing the rocket forward. The amount of push, or force, is easily calculated by the formula "Force equals mass times acceleration," or F = Ma. The amount of force created is based on how much stuff you throw out the back and at what speed you throw it.
Such is not the case with the EM drive which consists of a special-shaped resonant cavity in which microwave energy is bounced around in a specific pattern, very similar to a microwave oven. But the shape of this cavity seems to generate a thrust in one direction. This defies Newton's third law, that says in a sealed system all forces in all directions would cancel and it shouldn't create any overall force in any direction.
NASA has measured the amount of force of the drive they're testing at approximately 1.2 milliNewtons/kilowatt of energy of the microwave signal inside the cavity. Modern microwave ovens use 1.1 kilowatts (1100 watts), to give you a comparison. Now a Newton isn't much. It's defined as the amount of force needed to accelerate a 1 kg mass (about 2.2 pounds) at the rate of 1 meter/second (39.37 inches/second/second or 2.237 miles/hour/second.) Comparing this acceleration to a car, it would take about 27 seconds for the car to reach 60 mph. A milliNewton is 1/1000 of that amount. To reach that same speed will take 27,000 seconds or about 7-1/2 hours to reach 60 mph! But without any mass being ejected there's no limit to the amount of time the system can run. The engine runs only on electricity as its fuel and that can come from any source including solar cells.
Now NASA's experiments were conducted on earth. So there is some question if there were unknown factors that could generate this thrust, like rogue air currents, leaky electromagnetic radiation, or magnetic interactions. The next plan is to send an EM drive into space and test it in orbit. But, the Chinese space agency CAST (China Academy of Space Technology) announced just a few days ago that they've been testing an EM drive in space and they claim it worked the same as on earth. They also state they're incorporating an EM drive into their Tiangong 2 space laboratory and are going to try to improve its efficiency to between 0.1 to 1 Newton of force.
So have we stumbled across that staple of science fiction space travel, the warp drive? Only time will tell.
Thus Captain James T. Kirk would send the Enterprise off on another adventure in the old Star Trek television series. (I'm ignoring the new movies...heh!) The key to traveling the vast distances in outer space was, of course, the fictional warp drive that bent space around the ship (warped it) and propelled the ship forward. The warp drive engines moved the ship without actually ejecting any mass, what is known in science as a reactionless drive.
Well, NASA just published a peer reviewed paper on the EM (for ElectroMagnetic) drive, a reactionless drive that shouldn't work...but appears that it does, much to the chagrin of many physicists. Now the peer review doesn't guarantee the EM drive actually works, but it means other scientists have looked at the experimental setup, the results, and the conclusions and found them to be reasonable within the realms of science.
One of the founding building blocks of physics as we know it is Newton's Third Law, which states "For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction." It's the standard that our current rocket technology is based on. You burn a highly volatile fuel and force it out the back of the rocket, pushing the rocket forward. The amount of push, or force, is easily calculated by the formula "Force equals mass times acceleration," or F = Ma. The amount of force created is based on how much stuff you throw out the back and at what speed you throw it.
Such is not the case with the EM drive which consists of a special-shaped resonant cavity in which microwave energy is bounced around in a specific pattern, very similar to a microwave oven. But the shape of this cavity seems to generate a thrust in one direction. This defies Newton's third law, that says in a sealed system all forces in all directions would cancel and it shouldn't create any overall force in any direction.
NASA has measured the amount of force of the drive they're testing at approximately 1.2 milliNewtons/kilowatt of energy of the microwave signal inside the cavity. Modern microwave ovens use 1.1 kilowatts (1100 watts), to give you a comparison. Now a Newton isn't much. It's defined as the amount of force needed to accelerate a 1 kg mass (about 2.2 pounds) at the rate of 1 meter/second (39.37 inches/second/second or 2.237 miles/hour/second.) Comparing this acceleration to a car, it would take about 27 seconds for the car to reach 60 mph. A milliNewton is 1/1000 of that amount. To reach that same speed will take 27,000 seconds or about 7-1/2 hours to reach 60 mph! But without any mass being ejected there's no limit to the amount of time the system can run. The engine runs only on electricity as its fuel and that can come from any source including solar cells.
Now NASA's experiments were conducted on earth. So there is some question if there were unknown factors that could generate this thrust, like rogue air currents, leaky electromagnetic radiation, or magnetic interactions. The next plan is to send an EM drive into space and test it in orbit. But, the Chinese space agency CAST (China Academy of Space Technology) announced just a few days ago that they've been testing an EM drive in space and they claim it worked the same as on earth. They also state they're incorporating an EM drive into their Tiangong 2 space laboratory and are going to try to improve its efficiency to between 0.1 to 1 Newton of force.
So have we stumbled across that staple of science fiction space travel, the warp drive? Only time will tell.
