The famed EM Drive is a bust
- that's the take-home message from a team of physicists who have tested the
controversial fuel-less propulsion system that appears to produce thrust while
violating Newton's third law. Which means physics as we know it might be safe
for a little bit longer.
Researchers from TU Dresden
in Germany created their own replica of the EM Drive and analysed the amount of
force it produced under various conditions - and found it was producing
something even when theoretically it should not. Presenting their results at
this year's Aeronautics and Astronautics Association of France's Space
Propulsion conference, the physicists admitted something was affecting the
system, but it wasn't thrust.
By hanging their replica
propulsion system in a vacuum and measuring the movement with a laser, they
found they could reverse the field, and even reduce its power - but the drive
continued to behave as if it was producing roughly the same amount of force.
This is the story of the
little engine that shouldn't – a propulsion system based on a push of
electromagnetic radiation that seems to drive forward while contradicting the
very physics that explain it.
The EM Drive is also known
as a 'radio frequency resonant cavity thruster'. Imagine a metal cone containing
an electromagnetic field that produces thrust without ejecting any material. If
you remember your high school physics, this makes no sense. At least, not
without invoking some fringe interpretations of the laws of physics.
Newton figured out that a force
is a combination of mass and acceleration. He also worked out they always come
in pairs – an action force going one way, and a reaction force going the other.
Unless some kind of mass was
being pushed out the back of this thing, an EM Drive based on a kind of
propulsion simply shouldn't move itself through empty space. But as far back as
2001, devices based around this concept have seemed to be doing the impossible
by producing a force in a complete vacuum.
Mind you, we're not talking
any serious shoving here, with tests conducted by NASA in 2016 indicating it
could barely manage a millinewton of force. Cut an apple into a thousand blocks
and then hold one of them in your hand, and you'd get some idea of what that
amount of push would feel like.
Such a tiny effect was
always in the realm of experimental error or outside interference. Still, the
distant promise of an engine that could slowly accelerate an object towards
lightspeed without weighing it down with propellants has been too compelling to
ignore.
If its effects could be
scaled up, such a system could allow us to reach nearby planets in weeks, and
even distant stars within single generations. As recently as last year there
have been rumours of research bodies carrying out tests on the device in the
hope that there's been a loophole in the laws of physics that could permit such
a revolution in space travel.
So, what's happening? There
is still a mystery to be solved, but for now it's looking as if that strange
pushing motion isn't going to prove useful for space travel.
The researchers from TU
Dresden are confident the tiny amount of force is coming from outside of the
device, most likely generated by Earth's magnetic field acting on the microwave
amplifier. Any future testing would need to shield the cabling in the device
from magnetic fields. No doubt there will be more studies in the future that
will work to resolve the question of why the EM Drive behaves as strangely as
it does.
History is full of these
kinds of disappointments, where small hints of big payoffs are chased in spite
of seeming impossibility. Remember cold fusion in the 1980s?
If you're feeling
disappointed, don't forget, engineers still have a few tricks up their sleeve
to achieve fractional-lightspeed travel.
Those ideas are going to
need a lot of work if they're to be realised, but they have a lot more going
for them right now than the EM Drive; it might be time we back a different
horse and let go of our hopes for possibilities of an impossible propulsion
system.
The research was presented
at the 2018 Space Propulsion conference in Spain, and is available here.
Source
Are you seriously saying you don't know what's going on. Bull shit. You just want government funding for doing non work.
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