/sci/ - Science & Math

Back to the business at hand
How does one build this for a magnetic sail prototype? We could easily fit one on a microsat and fling it beyond Earth’s magnetosphere to test its viability pretty quickly and cheaply
So how would we do it?

>>11805703
Here's a diagram of how it works. Basically you take a cylinder made of four electromagnets, and rotate the cylinder along its axis, and run current through the electromagnets. The conducting fluid is the plasma, either artificial in a lab test or the ambient solar wind plasma in space.
>no pressure for reference
1 nPa
> i just have to assume the field gets big enough in the pressure of space? what if it doesnt?
It does. The plasma size is effectively unbounded in the heliosphere so the same charge creates a field capable of deflecting an equal number of charged particles at any distance from the sun no matter how much volume that requires, thus constant thrust all the way to the heliopause if you leave the sail running.

>>11795567
>>11795600
Shitty boosters, basically. It's been tested on the ground and seems to work, but like any magsail it needs to exit Earth's magnetosphere to be useful for acceleration rather than braking. Since we don't have a lot of good ground stations pointing towards the poles that means pushing out to the moon if not further before switching the magnet on. That means a dedicated Falcon 9, a Falcon Heavy rideshare, or an expendable booster for now, which means LOADSAMONEY.

Also the 0.5g acceleration requires almost a kilometer of YBCO wire (4x saddle coils arranged in a cylinder, cylindrical diameter 30m) and a bigger spacecraft, so the first experiments will probably be the more modest 10kg version.

https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2017/12/29/the-plasma-magnet-drive-a-simple-cheap-drive-for-the-solar-system-and-beyond/

>>11795610
Basically you use chandelier colonies suspended from an orbital ring at an altitude so that people experience ~1g, and then use a series of tubes to pull in atmosphere for processing. Neptune in particular has a bunch of He3 and deuterium and other volatiles, and has a band reasonably close to atmosphere with 1g natural gravity. Isaac Arthur did a video on this.