Now a NASA engineer has come up with a new way to fling satellites through space on mere grams of fuel, tens of times as efficiently as today’s best space probe thrusters.
Instead of using deuterium and tritium as the fuel stocks, the new motor extracts energy from boron fuel.
"And according to his calculations, improvements in short-pulse laser systems could make this form of thruster more than 40 times as efficient as even the best of today's ionic propulsion systems that push spacecraft around. "
while the nuclear reaction seems to be sound at first view, I am not so sure how this would work: "Electromagnetic forces push the target and the alpha particles in the opposite directions, and the particles exit the spacecraft through a nozzle, providing the vehicle's thrust. "
You mean: "then why don't we have super fast internet?" :-)
If you zoom the map in, it's actually way past Noordwijk. My quess is this could be attached somewhere near the naval radio station area? This remembered me the good old times of bike trips in the dunes, eh...
Researchers have created a new material that can produce three or more free electrons every time it absorbs a single photon. This is unlike conventional semiconductors, which produce just one free electron per photon. Based on tiny semiconductor structures called quantum dots, the new material - developed by researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Toyota Europe in Belgium - could someday be used to make more efficient solar cells.
For more than a century scientists have relied on the "ergodic theorem" to explain diffusive processes such as the movement of molecules in a liquid. However, they had not been able to confirm experimentally a central tenet of the theorem - that the average of repeated measurements of the random motion of an individual molecule is the same as the random motion of the entire ensemble of those molecules. Now, however, researchers in Germany have measured both parameters in the same system - making them the first to confirm experimentally that the ergodic theorem applies to diffusion.
"The BICEP2 data would eliminate about 90% of inflationary models, Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford University in California, told a packed auditorium at MIT the day after the BICEP2 announcement (see picture below). Many of those models do not produce gravitational waves at detectable levels, said Linde, who is one of the founders of inflation theory."
Is there any hope for LISA now?
Just getting a particle up to near the speed of light isn't good enough for today's physics. To properly unravel the fundamentals of the universe, particles have to be smashed together with enormous force. And two Stanford researchers have just devised a laser-based method that imparts ten times the power of traditional methods at a fraction of the cost.