- 31 Aug 2016 11:46
#14714171
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/emdrive-finnis ... st-1565673
We are on the cusp of harnessing the awesome capabilities of a mysterious natural phenomenon. Get your ass to Mars.
A new peer-reviewed paper on the EmDrive from Finland states that the controversial electromagnetic space propulsion technology does work due to microwaves fed into the device converting into photons that leak out of the closed cavity, producing an exhaust.
The research, entitled "On the exhaust of electromagnetic drive", is published in the journal AIP Advances 6 and is the brainchild of Dr Arto Annila, a physics professor at the University of Helsinki; Dr Erkki Kolehmainen, an organic chemistry professor at the University of Jyväskylä; and Patrick Grahn, a multiphysicist at engineering software firm Comsol.
Read more about EmDrive on IBTimes UK:
British scientist Roger Shawyer devised the EmDrive concept and first presented it in 1999, but spent years having his technology ridiculed by the international space science research community. According to Shawyer, if the technology is ever commercially realised, EmDrive could transform the aerospace industry and potentially solve the energy crisis, end climate change and speed up space travel by making it much cheaper to launch satellites and spacecraft into orbit.
Yet despite the controversy attached to the technology, since 2012 nine independent studies have been carried out by scientists from China, Germany and even Nasa to try to build and test their own versions of the EmDrive. Although the researchers are not sure why, they have all discovered signals of thrust that cannot be explained.
If the Finnish researchers are right about their theory explaining how exactly the EmDrive is able to produce thrust, then other scientists would be able to build better cavities that produce more thrust as they would understand how to detect the exhaust being produced.
"So how could something come out that you can't detect? Well, the photons bounce back and forth inside the metal cavity, and some of them end up going together in the same direction with the same speed, but they are 180 degrees out of phase. Invariably, when travelling together in this out-of-phase configuration, they cancel each other's electromagnetic field out completely.
"That's the same as water waves travelling together so that the crest of one wave is exactly at the trough of the other and cancelling each other out. The water does not go away, it's still there, in the same way the pairs of photons are still there and carrying momentum even though you can't see them as light.
"If you don't have electromagnetic properties on the waves as they have cancelled each other out, then they don't reflect from the cavity walls anymore. Instead they leak out of the cavity. So we have an exhaust – the photons are leaking out pair-wise."
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/emdrive-finnis ... st-1565673
We are on the cusp of harnessing the awesome capabilities of a mysterious natural phenomenon. Get your ass to Mars.
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