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NASA’s Physics-Defying EM Drive To Be Tested In Space




NASA’s EM Drive will be tested in space sometime in the next six months, according to reports published Tuesday by ScienceAlert.

An EM Drive will be launched into space aboard a small satellite. The drive will be launched into a decaying orbit, which it can only maintain if it functions properly. The EM Drive is extremely contentious among scientists, since it allegedly uses exotic physics to violate Newton’s Third Law and the law of conservation of momentum.

A NASA scientist confirmed online late last month that the Em Drive “warp drive” has passed peer-review; NASA itself has not yet confirmed the test results. A Finnish team recently published a peer-reviewed paper proposing that an EM Drive could work by generating unseen exhaust which would still carry momentum.

“People all around the world have been measuring thrust. You’ve got guys building them in their garages and very large organisations building cavities too,” Roger Shawyer, the British scientist who first proposed the concept of Em Drive in 1999, told International Business Times late last month. “They’re all generating thrust, there’s no great mystery. People think it’s black magic or something, but it’s not. Any physicist worth his salt should understand how it works, or if they don’t, they should change their profession.”

Shawyer claims that the drive generates thrust through radiation pressure. The Em Drive first gained prominence after NASA’s secretive Eagleworks lab published a non peer-reviewed technical report attesting it generated a small amount of thrust by an unknown mechanism. All three attempts to replicate the drive’s thrust results were successful, but the amounts of thrust generated were relatively low and could have been the result of experimental error.

If successful, the device could make it much cheaper to move satellites and spacecraft around in space, as well as have numerous terrestrial applications. The development of Em Drive was funded by the British government and licences by aerospace giant Boeing. Testing of the Em Drive has been plagued by experimental design issues and repeated delays.

DailyCaller


Here is the ScienceAlert article for those who like more technical info. or in case you don’t already know what the EM Drive is all about.

The ‘Impossible’ EM Drive is about to be Tested in Space

An actual EM Drive is about to be launched into space for the first time, so scientists can finally figure out – once and for all – if it really is possible for a rocket engine to generate thrust without any kind of exhaust or propellant.

Built by American inventor and chemical engineer, Guido Fetta, the EM Drive is as controversial as it gets, because while certain experiments have suggested that such an engine could work, it also goes against one of the most fundamental laws of physics we have.

As Newton’s Third Law states, “To each action there’s an equal and opposite reaction,” and many physicists say the EM Drive categorically violates that law.

This is because in order for a thruster to gain momentum in a certain direction, it has to expel some kind of propellent or exhaust in the opposite direction.

But the EM Drive simply goes in one direction with no propellant, and thus violates the law of conservation of momentum, which Newton derived from his Third Law.

And not only that, but it could produce enough thrust to blast humans to Mars in just 70 days.

As Fiona MacDonald put it back in June, space enthusiasts love to get excited about the EM Drive, because if it works, it has the potential to remove major barriers in our need to explore the Solar System and beyond.

But just as many are sick of hearing about it, because, on paper at least, it doesn’t work within the laws of physics.

Invented by British scientist Roger Shawyer back in 1999, the EM Drive – short for electromagnetic propulsion drive – purportedly works like this.

It uses electromagnetic waves as ‘fuel’, creating thrust by bouncing microwave photons back and forth inside a cone-shaped closed metal cavity. This causes the ‘pointy end’ of the EM Drive to accelerate in the opposite direction that the drive is going.

“To put it simply, electricity converts into microwaves within the cavity that push against the inside of the device, causing the thruster to accelerate in the opposite direction,” Mary-Ann Russon explains over at The International Business Times.

The EmDrive created by Shawyer's space company Satellite Propulsion Research LtdRoger Shawyer, Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd

The EmDrive created by Shawyer’s space company Satellite Propulsion Research LtdRoger Shawyer, Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd

Since its invention, the EM drive has shown no signs of quitting, in test after test. Last year, trials by NASA scientists at the Eagleworks lab revealed “anomalous thrust signals”, and an independent researcher in Germany conceded that the propulsion system, somehow, does indeed produce thrust.

Fast-forward to now, and there are rumours that the NASA Eagleworks paper we reported on in June has finally passed the peer-review process, and is expected to be published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Journal of Propulsion and Power.

If the rumours by José Rodal from MIT are true – and let’s be clear, they’re still just rumours at this point – it could be huge.

As Brendan Hesse explains for Digital Trends:

“This is an important step for the EM Drive as it adds legitimacy to the technology and the tests done thus far, opening the door for other groups to replicate the tests. This will also allow other groups to devote more resources to uncovering why and how it works, and how to iterate on the drive to make it a viable form of propulsion.

So, while a single peer-reviewed paper isn’t going to suddenly equip the human race with interplanetary travel, it’s the first step toward eventually realising that possible future.”

And on top of all of that, we’re about to see an actual EM Drive be blasted into space.

Guido Fetta is CEO of Cannae Inc, and the inventor of the Cannae Drive – a rocket engine that’s based on Roger Shawyer’s original EM Drive design. Last month, he announced that he would launch this thruster on a 6U CubeSat – a type of miniaturised satellite.

David Hambling reports for Popular Mechanics that roughly one-quarter of this shoebox-sized satellite will be taken up by the Cannae Drive, and they’ll stay in orbit for at least six months: “The longer it stays in orbit, the more the satellite will show that it must be producing thrust without propellant.”

No launch date has been set just yet, but it could happen in as soon as six months’ time.

As Hambling points out, Fetta better hurry, because a team of engineers in China, and Shawyer himself, are both also working on their own launchable EM Drives, so someone’s going to get there first, and we seriously cannot wait to see what will happen.

ScienceAlert

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