3 ms·
no particles needed, we already have ion drive, just need electricity
by aspbee555 1y ago
no particles needed, we already have ion drive, just need electricity
- Taniwha 1y agoIons are atoms ..... tiny particles
- lmm 1y agoIons are small enough that you can bring enough for a whole trip pretty easily. Yes they're still consumable, but you need a tiny fraction of the reaction mass you need with a conventional rocket.
- grues-dinner 1y agoQuite big tiny particles in this application: Xenon is a fairly hefty atomic number of 54 - exactly double iron. And you need quite a bit of it: even fairly small spacecraft like probes can have nearly a tonne of the stuff. Which, considering there's only 30-40ish tonnes extracted per year at a cost of about 1.5ish dollars per gram is quite a bit!
- nosignono 1y agoJust out of curiosity, what do you think an ion is?
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoIon drives ionize particles like xenon and expel them; they're much more fuel/weight efficient than burning fuel but they still use fuel, unfortunately. There's been a number of pure electric propulsion proposals or prototypes, but they've all turned out to be a hoax; the latest one I recall was the EmDrive [0], where any paper claiming it produced positive thrust was debunked with the measurements having been influenced by outside forces. The TL;DR is that reactionless drives are not possible due to Newton's third law. This page / this website is always a great resource for things like this, it's in the context of writing science fiction but it has tons of research: [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive [1] https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/reactionlessdrive.php https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/reactionlessdr...