This man is living his best mad scientist life...making ionic engines in his garage. Or testing the atmospheric pressure of tomato paste.... And I'm sitting here wondering where my life diverged from this possibility....
Can we look into the science of the helical light speed engine in simplified terms, whether it’s workable or not lol. That’s should be an interesting experiment.
The ion rockets we currently have use less than 200 milligrams of xenon gas a minute. Since an object in motion stays in motion, you'd only need more gas to fight the gravity wells of passing objects, keeping yourself on course. Otherwise, you spend a few days building up to your top speed and coast along. Then you'd need an equal amount of gas to slow down. If you watch "The Expanse," this is why the show uses the phrase "flip and burn," as stopping your spacecraft is just as important as getting it into motion. So you'd spend a few days burning the engine and ramping up the speed (I believe we can currently get up to 90,000 meters a second with ion engines), then halfway through the trip, flip your craft so the rockets face your target, burn the engine again, and spend a few days slowing back down. I highly recommend The Expanse for a scientifically accurate portrayal of space travel with lots of fun sci-fi action.
The only speed limit any rocket has is the speed of light. The limitations are mostly acceleration and efficiency. Chemical rockets are very powerful, which is why they're used for missions with time constraints, and to launch heavy payloads from the ground. However, while one pound of chemical fuel can push with a pound of force for about 9 minutes, a pound of gas in an ion engine pushing with a pound of force can burn for over an hour. The drawback is that ion engines are much, much less powerful, so we won't be using them for big rockets anytime soon. They are still fantastic for long-range, long-duration flights, though, because low thrust + a lot of time = a lot of speed. Given sufficient fuel and time, you can go as fast as you want with any engine.
Only place I’ve ever heard ‘ion thrusters’ pi’s in Thunderbirds are Go which was cool Now I see his and am super happy they’re a real concept in physics
Dear action lab in my opinion you told it right it create a thrust on air and move forward but in vaccum it doesn't work coz there is no air but there is newtons third law as well so if we use this plasma thrust in space in 0 gravity then the ion will release from the nozal and it will push the rocket foreward. Like a water pipe jiggle and shake due to release of high pressure water from the pipe
@Saitama I did. He only did it with the positive electrode. It rips electrons off gas atoms. Then it repels and creates thrust. Would it work on the negative end? Would it “give” electrons and generate the same thrust?
Not really about power, in space you need to carry your own propellant. Because it's limited, it's preferable to get as much "go" out of your propellant as you can, and that's what ion thrusters do by accelerating their propellant to high speeds using electric fields.
You'll already be getting thrust from ejecting the gasses out (like that of a nozzle), but if you want to make the most out of your stored propellant, you'd want ion propulsion on top of that ejection thrust. In essence both at the same time.
If you can put that model with the scale planes in a vacuum and achieve propulsion that would be more than enough for me to be convinced of propulsion in space.
I think they like xenon for ion thrusters because it likes to ionize and is rather heavy for a gas atom. xenon is also an amazing psychoactive drug with similar effects to nitrous oxide but far more potent, chemically it is totally safe for the brain, it's just a by-chance effect that it fits in a particular anesthetic receptor. It is very expensive on the consumer level but I doubt its price is much of a concern in NASA projects when they are considering ion thrusters.
Question: IF we wanted to create an engine/drive for a spacecraft, would the following theory work? Mimic how the earth creates its own magnetic field and travels/falls through space. Ex, Bob Lazar described a small reactor in what he thought to be the engine level of the craft he worked on, he also said that the "fuel" was element 115. My theory is this... Fision is what starts to take place, then as the material collapses on itsself, you begin to push the spent 115 into a terrific spin (much like the metal in the earth's core that spins), This will create a magnetic field around the craft aka a bubble that pushes antimatter away from the front of the craft, and therfore "falling" in which ever direction the craft leans, UP or down is simply flipping either the drive itsself or the core within the reactor and making the bubble bounce up or down. What do you think? I'm pretty sure much arter people than me, figured this out long ago. But it's just something I thought about, and you're a smart guy, so I thought I would ask.
Would you like a list of everything wrong with that? Just for starters, magnetism has exactly nothing to do with the Earth’s motion through space. Element 115 has a half-life of less than a second and has only ever been observed in the lab. And where the heck are you expecting to get antimatter from?
@@eroraf8637 idk, I just went to public school. I just had an idea or a theory, and you want to come in a tear it down. It's all good. That's why I started it with "Question" and "IF", because idk. But you go ahead and be an ass. Enjoy your day. I can admit my ignorance. If your going to go at someone, make sure you understand if it's a question or a statement. Clearly, I was asking a question.
Unfortunately, element 115 (Moscovium) does not naturally occur and is so radioactive it would decay into element 113 (Nihonium, just as radioactive) and element 2 (Helium) pretty much immediately after creation. A massive particle accelerator and huge amounts of energy would be needed to create even a few atoms of it and any significant amount would instantly turn into superheated, very radioactive plasma. Also, space is a vacuum that does not contain much of any kind of matter, especially no antimatter. Earths orbit does also not have anything to do with either magnetism, antimatter or element 115.
@@janniswess2813 and you know this, how? I ask, because, we still don't know what dark matter really is and the affects it has on the known elements and physics as we know it. Have you conducted experiments in space? Have you been there? Because if you have, that would be very interesting. You THINK you know, but you truly don't. We as a human race are so arrogant in our assumptions. We think the science and especially physics that we "know" is all there is, however just about every year or so we discover how wrong or right we are. I understand why you would refute my theory, but I think I will be proven correct in the very near future. Or, I am just a public school knucklehead with a crazy theory I put out there so folks like you can tell me how wrong I am. Either way, I'm good with it.
Space Rocket's ion thrusters rely on another ion source than the atmospheric air, usually xenon. The ammount of thrust they produce makes them useless in an atmosphere though, as they are right now...
Yes. Since the force on the spacecraft is equal and opposite to the force on the exhaust, anything you do to imbue the gas with more backwards acceleration will increase the forwards acceleration on the spacecraft.
If water touches a surface of water; the surface is wet. But water is always touching a surface of other h2o particles, so is water wet is my question? Please respond
That's correct, ion thrusters do have "fuel." Xenon is not very common, but it has a high molecular weight, is non-reactive and has a high vapourisation temperature so it's easier to store as a liquid.
They use noble gases to prevent any side reactions and Xenon is used because of it's low ionization energy which allows you to actually propel the gas with electricity.
We should make an ion engine powered spacecraft that's solar powered. It could have two large solar panels on the sides so it's head on silhouette looks like and H. It'll have twin ion engines (TIE) and to forward facing guns. We can call it the TIE fighter.
Nobody crams more knowledge that you'll actually take with you in a couple of minutes than this guy. So in space you would basically have to put a bubble with air in it around the electrode, and then the electrode would push the air which pushes the bubble which is attached to the spacecraft? Awesomesauce.
This could be used for 1g constant acceleration and allow a spacecraft to approach the speed of light, traveling the edge of the known universe in 50 years (its pilot would age backwards).
You can't lol. It takes an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light, so you'd need an infinite amount of fuel which is an infinite amount of mass. Therefore it can't happen.
Ion engines produce an incredibly weak thrust. However they're very efficient. You might be able to sustain 0.00000001G for years. But humanity is a long way from sustained 1G, or even 0.1G . The rocket equation is an ugly MFer. Hopefully we won't have to wait 300 years for our Epstein to be born. And time dilation doesn't make you age backwards. It makes time run slower compared to people traveling slower than you. But time always moves forward, never backward.
space isn't a complete vacuum though, so technically we don't really need to bring our own gas. it'll be useful but interspellar space has about 1 atom per cubic centimeter, and assuming we can collect them as we pass through them and propell them behind us theoretically you could keep a very small accellaration going.