39 Days to Mars: NASA Selects Companies to Develop Super-Fast Deep Space Engine

39 Days to Mars

NASA Selects Companies to Develop Super-Fast Deep Space Engine

 

Image © AD ASTRA

 

NASA announced it will partner with a variety of companies in new attempts to create more advanced space technology--including a new engine that could get humans to Mars in less than 40 days.

The Texas-based Ad Astra Rocket company, a member of NASA’s 12 Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextStep), boasted their VASIMR engine can get humans to Mars in 39 days. 

© AD ASTRA - A diagram showing how the VASIMR works

The engine rocketed to fame several years ago when it was revealed to cut a journey to Mars down from months to weeks. And even though it does require a nuclear power source, of which NASA has a shortage, after its successful test in 2013 the agency is considering employing it.

“We are thrilled by this announcement and proud to be joining forces with NASA in the final steps of the technology maturation,” said Dr Franklin Chang Diaz, Ad Astra’s Chairman and CEO, in a statement.

“We look forward to a very successful partnership as we jointly advance the technology to flight readiness.”

© AD ASTRA The VX 200 prototype VASIMR engine that could potentially be a part of the next Mars mission. 

Over a three year period, NASA will give Ad Astra around $10 million dollars to fully develop a new version of the VASIMR engine to be flight ready. With the successful demonstrations of their new VX-200-SS prototype, able to fire continuously for more than 100 hours, NASA will consider employing the propulsion system on their future excursion to Mars. 

NASA said in a statement that other commercial partners such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Dynetics Inc were in place to explore other possibilities on Mars. 

“Commercial partners were selected for their technical ability to mature key technologies and their commitment to the potential applications both for government and private sector uses,” said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA Headquarters.

“This work ultimately will inform the strategy to move human presence further into the solar system.”

A Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR), developed by Ad Astra, is an electromagnetic thruster for the propulsion of a spacecraft. It employs radio waves and magnetic fields to ionize and heat a propellant to generate a thrust for lift off.

Russia, US to Jointly Prepare Mars, Moon Flight Road Map – NASA

 

 

Image © NASA. Goddard Space Flight Center

Russia and the United States will work together on a roadmap to send humans to Mars and the Moon, according to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

The Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos and its US counterpart NASA will jointly hammer out a "road map" program on flights to Mars and the Moon, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said on Saturday.

Bolden, who is currently on a tour of Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, added that he had discussed joint efforts to send missions to the Red Planet with Roscosmos head Igor Komarov, including time frames and funding.

"Our area of cooperation will be Mars. We are discussing how best to use the resources, the finance, we are setting time frames and distributing efforts in order to avoid duplication," Bolden said.

The NASA chief also pledged to put US astronauts back on the Moon, saying that his country never abandoned its hope of a comeback.

Bolden added that in the future, NASA is planning "to attract more private developers to our joint exploration projects of the Moon and Mars," as well as initiate an ambitious program to harvest minerals from an asteroid.

NASA announced the extension of cooperation with its International Space Station partners, including Russia, for another nine years in February.

The US-Russia cooperation on the development of the international Space Station is under way despite the fact that NASA halted the majority of its joint activities with Russia over the Ukraine crisis in April 2014.

The last US mission to the Moon was Apollo 17; its astronauts returned to Earth from its closest neighbor on December 19, 1972.

© NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA Tests Flying Saucer With Sights Set on Mars in 2020

© Sputnik/ Ekaterina Shtukina Russia, US Aim to Create New Space Station After 2024 - Roscosmos Chief

From Sputnik News @ http://sputniknews.com/science/20150402/1020349394.html and http://sputniknews.com/world/20150328/1020132249.html

For more information about space migration see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/smi2le

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A mighty wind: Thrusters powered by ionic wind may be an efficient alternative to conventional atmospheric propulsion technologies

A mighty wind

Thrusters powered by ionic wind may be an efficient alternative to conventional atmospheric propulsion technologies

by Jennifer Chu

When a current passes between two electrodes — one thinner than the other — it creates a wind in the air between. If enough voltage is applied, the resulting wind can produce a thrust without the help of motors or fuel.

This phenomenon, called electrohydrodynamic thrust — or, more colloquially, “ionic wind” — was first identified in the 1960s. Since then, ionic wind has largely been limited to science-fair projects and basement experiments; hobbyists have posted hundreds of how-to videos on building “ionocrafts” — lightweight vehicles made of balsa wood, aluminum foil and wire — that lift off and hover with increased voltage.

Despite this wealth of hobbyist information, there have been few rigorous studies of ionic wind as a viable propulsion system. Some researchers have theorized that ionic thrusters, if used as jet propulsion, would be extremely inefficient, requiring massive amounts of electricity to produce enough thrust to propel a vehicle.

Now researchers at MIT have run their own experiments and found that ionic thrusters may be a far more efficient source of propulsion than conventional jet engines. In their experiments, they found that ionic wind produces 110 newtons of thrust per kilowatt, compared with a jet engine’s 2 newtons per kilowatt. The team has published its results in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Steven Barrett, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, envisions that ionic wind may be used as a propulsion system for small, lightweight aircraft. In addition to their relatively high efficiency, ionic thrusters are silent, and invisible in infrared, as they give off no heat — ideal traits, he says, for a surveillance vehicle.

“You could imagine all sorts of military or security benefits to having a silent propulsion system with no infrared signature,” says Barrett, who co-authored the paper with graduate student Kento Masuyama.

Shooting the gap

A basic ionic thruster consists of three parts: a very thin copper electrode, called an emitter; a thicker tube of aluminum, known as a collector; and the air gap in between. A lightweight frame typically supports the wires, which connect to an electrical power source. As voltage is applied, the field gradient strips away electrons from nearby air molecules. These newly ionized molecules are strongly repelled by the corona wire, and strongly attracted to the collector. As this cloud of ions moves toward the collector, it collides with surrounding neutral air molecules, pushing them along and creating a wind, or thrust.

To measure an ion thruster’s efficiency, Barrett and Masuyama built a similarly simple setup, and hung the contraption under a suspended digital scale. They applied tens of thousands of volts, creating enough current draw to power an incandescent light bulb. They altered the distance between the electrodes, and recorded the thrust as the device lifted off the ground. Barrett says that the device was most efficient at producing lower thrust — a desirable, albeit counterintuitive, result.

“It’s kind of surprising, but if you have a high-velocity jet, you leave in your wake a load of wasted kinetic energy,” Barrett explains. “So you want as low-velocity a jet as you can, while still producing enough thrust.” He adds that an ionic wind is a good way to produce a low-velocity jet over a large area.

Getting to liftoff

Barrett acknowledges that there is one big obstacle to ionic wind propulsion: thrust density, or the amount of thrust produced per given area. Ionic thrusters depend on the wind produced between electrodes; the larger the space between electrodes, the stronger the thrust produced. That means lifting a small aircraft and its electrical power supply would require a very large air gap. Barrett envisions that electrodynamic thrusters for aircraft — if they worked — would encompass the entire vehicle.

Another drawback is the voltage needed to get a vehicle off the ground: Small, lightweight balsa models require several kilovolts. Barrett estimates a small craft, with onboard instrumentation and a power supply, would need hundreds or thousands of kilovolts.

“The voltages could get enormous,” Barrett says. “But I think that’s a challenge that’s probably solvable.” For example, he says power might be supplied by lightweight solar panels or fuel cells. Barrett says ionic thrusters might also prove useful in quieter cooling systems for laptops.

Ned Allen, chief scientist and senior fellow at Lockheed Martin Corp., says that while ionic thrusters face serious drawbacks — particularly for aerospace applications — the technology “offers nearly miraculous potential.”

“[Electrohydrodynamic thrust] is capable of a much higher efficiency than any combustion reaction device, such as a rocket or jet thrust-production device,” Allen says. Partly for this reason, Allen says Lockheed Martin is looking into the technology as a potential means of propulsion.

“Efficiency is probably the number one thing overall that drives aircraft design,” Barrett says. “[Ionic thrusters] are viable insofar as they are efficient. There are still unanswered questions, but because they seem so efficient, it’s definitely worth investigating further."

From MIT News @ http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/ionic-thrusters-0403.html

NASA’s NEXT ion drive breaks world record, will eventually power interplanetary missions

• By Sebastian Anthony

 

Proving yet again that Star Trek was scarily prescient, NASA has announced that its NEXT ion drive — NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster — has operated continually for over 43,000 hours (five years). This is an important development, as ion thrusters are pegged as one of the best ways to power long-term deep-space missions to other planets and solar systems. With a proven life time of at least five years, NEXT engines just made a very big step towards powering NASA’s next-gen spacecraft.

Ion thrusters work, as the name suggests, by firing ions (charged atoms or molecules) out of a nozzle at high speed (pictured above). In the case of NEXT, operation is fairly simple. Xenon (a noble gas) is squirted into a chamber. An electron gun (think cathode ray tube TV) fires electrons at the xenon atoms, creating a plasma of negative and positive ions. The positive ions diffuse to the back of the chamber, where high-charged accelerator grids grabs the ions and propel them out of the engine, creating thrust. The energy to power the electron gun can either come from solar panels, or from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (i.e. a nuclear battery, just like Curiosity).

A diagram of an electrostatic ion thruster (as in NASA’s NEXT, and most other ion thrusters)

The downside of ion thrusters, though, is that the amount of thrust produced is minuscule: State-of-the-art ion thrusters can deliver a grand total of 0.5 newtons of thrust (equivalent to the force of a few coins pushing down on your hand), while chemical thrusters (which power just about every spacecraft ever launched) on a satellite or probe deliver hundreds or thousands of newtons. The flip side of this, though — and the reason ion thrusters are so interesting — is that they have a fuel efficiency that’s 10 to 12 times greater than chemical thrusters. Obviously, for long trips through space, fuel efficiency is very important.

With such puny thrust, a NEXT-based ion drive would need to run for 10,000 hours — just over a year — to reach a suitable speed for space travel. Dawn, a NASA probe that’s powered by previous-generation NSTAR ion thrusters, accelerated from 0 to 60 mph in four days. As a corollary, ion thrusters only work at all because of the near-vacuum of space; if there was any friction at all, like here on Earth, an ion drive would be useless. The good news, though, is that the (eventual) max speed of a spacecraft propelled by an ion drive is in the region of 200,000 miles per hour (321,000 kph).

Moving forward, it now remains to be seen if NASA will use the NEXT on an actual spacecraft. In 2011, NASA put out a request-for-proposals for a test mission that will likely use a NEXT engine, and presumably, following this successful engine test, we might soon hear more news about that. Other space agencies, including the ESA, are also working on spacecraft propelled by ion thrusters.


From Extreme Tech @ http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/144296-nasas-next-ion-drive-breaks-world-record-will-eventually-power-interplanetary-missions


For more information about ionic propulsion see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/ionic%20propulsion and
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