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Experimental Magnetic Shield Against Cosmic Rays
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Nov 04, 2008 12:06 PM
from the but-not-against-hyperbole dept.
from the but-not-against-hyperbole dept.
stiller writes "British scientists from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have developed an experimental set-up in which a $20 magnet is used to deflect solar-wind-like radiation." Reader Dersaidin points out a slightly more enthusiastic article at Universe Today which emphasizes the possibilities of systems based on this phenomenon to protect astronauts during solar storms, writing
"It's a good start. Hopefully, later versions will be able to protect spaceships from energy weapons. A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of copper. Shields, check. Energy weapons, check. Now we just need a viable interstellar drive, and an energy source to power it all."
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Experimental Magic Shield Against Cosmic Rays (Score:4, Funny)
Did anyone else misread the title?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Oh ...takes off wizard robe and hat
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought it said "Experimental Magnetic Shield Against Cosplayers". I was planning to pick one up next time I went to Fry's.
Re:Experimental Magic Shield Against Cosmic Rays (Score:4, Interesting)
Will any sufficiently advanced society resemble cosplay?
Parent
Drive and Power source (Score:2, Insightful)
Make the drive coils out of uranium and power it with allotropic iron.
Of course, you will have to give the ship a good British-sounding name like "The Dentless".
ANd remember to really reinforce the breech shielding on the Q-Gun.
Scorched Earth Deflector Shields (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You should try Scorched 3D [scorched3d.co.uk], then.
Very good remake. Good graphics, runs on pretty much any hardware, Linux and Windows version, multiplayer. And seeing half the island disappear after firing something very overkill is really awesome.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
so if you slashdot their site do you win?
ah... found it on SourceForge [sourceforge.net]
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Nope, but it sounds exactly like the magnetic radiation shielding used in a sci-fi juvie from the 80's or 90's. It was set in the moons of Jupiter and the characters used small open "shuttles" that had magnets placed on the frame around the passengers. This protected them from radiation in the Jovian system.
Re:Prior Art (Score:4, Interesting)
I was looking for a serious thread to reply to, but it seems this topic attracts more kidding than science. =p
Anyway, my college plasma physics professor, a decade ago, told us that he'd invented the "force field". It created a magnetic shield around an object in a vacuum, and was intended to protect things like satellites from charged particles. (For obvious reasons discussed below he didn't go into detail.)
His work was funded by the U.S. Air Force, who promptly took the patent and classified it. In other words, this was invented about 15 years ago, and this guy might have just made it public, but he's likely not going to get a patent to protect his invention since it will be rejected.
Parent
USS Liberty (Score:5, Funny)
I suggest mounting a standard generator at the core of the prospective space ship and attaching a coffin containing one of our founding fathers to it. The rapid spinning should provide plentiful power for all manner of techno-gadgetry.
you mean engines like... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like Highlander (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone else remember that awful sequel [imdb.com]?
Re:Sounds like Highlander (Score:5, Funny)
There is no sequel. There can be only one.
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Re: (Score:2)
erm ... (Score:2)
As long as we're not venting drive plasma, we're good to go.
That is, unless somebody left a sweater in one of the warp plasma conduits.
Tea or Death? (Score:5, Funny)
This brings up a larger issue to me...how well does tea steep in zero G, And would there be a difference between an Earl Grey blend or a black tea blend?
Re:Tea or Death? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, obviously for the Earl Grey, you have to say "Hot", as in "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot", or it comes cold.
For the black tea blend, you get a cup of a drink that's almost but not quite entirely unlike tea.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
If you're hovering over a kettle, you may as well brew up a really hot cup of tea, and let your Infinite Improbability Drive get you out of harm's way. Either that, or thr Drive will turn the radiation storm into music, and you can protect yourself with earplugs. For that matter, if the tea is *really* hot, you can specify that the music be "Silence" by Phillip Glass, and skip the earplugs.
I doubt tea would steep well in zero G, because there would be no natural convection. Ordinary stirring is a no-no,
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
how well does tea steep in zero G
I don't know, but you can drink it with chopsticks. [nasa.gov]
Checklist... (Score:3, Funny)
No, what we need is a strong hull that can withstand all the micro-meteoriods hitting it at 27,000+ mph.
I recommend getting a General Products #2 hull.
Re:Checklist... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
hot stuff (Score:2, Funny)
Now we just need a viable interstellar drive, and an energy source to power it all.
Then it's all alien babes from here to the farthest star! Warp factor exosex, Scotty, all power to the engines!
You know what this means... (Score:4, Funny)
Spoiler Alert - Shields (Score:2)
Hey, we got the Fantastic Four, least according to the movie, because the shields DIDN'T work.
Sorry for the movie spoiler.
A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of copp (Score:4, Informative)
A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of copper.
Technically, if things are set up, any continuous source of energy can melt just about anything meltable. Just keep the energy flowing, insulate the target, and if the temperature of the energy source (e.g. a lightbulb) is higher than that of the target, then energy will couple in and eventually melt the target. What needs to be mentioned if such a statement is to be of any use, is how long such melting is expected to take.
Re:A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of c (Score:4, Informative)
According to this CERN page [web.cern.ch], in the few microseconds that it takes a beam dump to complete. The circulating kinetic energy of the beam is an impressive 350 MJ, equivalent to running a 1000 watt heater for 97 hours.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
That is the most amazing engineering article I have read in quite some time.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with what you're saying.
But what they could be talking about -- something that's actually a useful metric -- is whether the energy source can get energy into a material faster than it can conduct the heat away. It's comparatively easy to drill a hole in a thermally insulative material with a laser, but much harder with copper. So if they want to make an impressive statement, they probably should make it clear (to those of us who care) that this thing can dump energy in, faster than any material ca
Re: (Score:2)
s how long such melting is expected to take.
Presumably, about the time it takes light to travel 27km, since the beam can't be longer than the circumference of the collider and the beam is near light speed.
From page 2 of linked article (Score:5, Informative)
What needs to be mentioned if such a statement is to be of any use, is how long such melting is expected to take.
That's a very good point, and to answer the question raised by it I RTFAed so you don't have to! Regarding the "dump block" that they use to absorb the LHC beam before it becomes unstable:
Emphasis added. That's one hell of a beam.
BTW, I can't help but recall that the Enterprise D from ST:TNG fires its phasers from a large ring on the saucer section. You can almost imagine the LHC being weaponized and using the same technique that diverts the beam into the dump block to direct it outward towards enemy ships. Though it'd have the rather significant drawback that any damage anywhere on the enormous accelerator ring would take out the weapon. But hey, energy beam!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe we're in the alternate universe, where the Federation was evil.
The theory bears scrutiny. Haven't you noticed the popularity of goatees?
Re:A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of c (Score:5, Informative)
FTA, testing showed a 1.5 mm beam "burnt" 40 meters into a block of copper in 86 microseconds.
So... napkin calculation...
density of copper is about 9 g/cm^2, so 5600 grams of copper melted per
500 lbs =~ 227 kg, so roughly forty 86 microsecond bursts to melt 500 lbs...
So we're talking roughly 3.5 milliseconds to melt 500 pounds of copper.
That's 70 tons of copper melted per second for a single beam. That's a hell of a lot of energy, but I'm not sure what the standard unit is for energy/time (hiroshimas is just energy; libraries of congress and football fields obviously don't apply). Anyone know what the standard made-up unit is for energy/time?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Watt? Horsepower? Michael Phelps? NSA datacenter electricity usage? Total solar output?
Popularized unit (Score:3, Informative)
"Hoover Dams" are the units used to represent such things as the power output of the Shuttle main engines. Other popular ones are "enough to light N,000 homes" and "equivalent to N nuclear power stations" (always nuclear, for some reason).
Melting copper takes 13.050 kJ/mol. A mole of copper is 63.546 grams. We'll drop everything to two significant figures, which is probably already more precise than the rest of the numbers. 70 tons is one million moles, so melting 70 tons per second is 13E12 J/sec, 13 teraw
Math Nazi Time.... (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, some math errors exist in some of the parent posts.
A 1.5mm diameter beam that is 40 meters long has a volume given by:
V = pi * r^2 * d
If r and d are in cm, then:
V = pi * (0.15/2)^2 * 400
V = pi * 0.005625 * 400
V = 7.07 cm^3.
At 9 g/cm, this gives a mass of 63.2 grams.
If we're melting/vaporizing this much in 86 uS, that gives a rate of
63.2 / 0.000086 = 734,883.72 g/s (or 1,620.14 lb/s).
It's still a bunch of melted (actually, vaporized) copper, but it's nowhere near 70 tons.
All the above assumes that the beam stays perfectly coherent and doesn't have any losses due to heating of surrounding material. In reality, the beam would rapidly diverge, and heat would begin to flow through the copper. Oh, also, ejected copper plasma would at some point begin to interfere with the beam itself before it reached the copper itself. This would rapidly de-focus the beam and absorb energy, so the plasma ejecta would get oh-my-god hot while shielding remaining copper from being damaged.
Parent
40meter hole in copper in 86usec (Score:2)
According to the article, the 1.5mm beam (already diffused from the original 0.2mm beam) can penetrate 40 meters (around 130ft) into solid copper in 86usec.
Now available from Monster (Score:5, Funny)
Space elevator (Score:3, Insightful)
When the space elevator eventually gets built, passengers are going to need something to protect them from the radiation in the Van Allen Belts. Rather than hauling a bunch of passive shielding up and down, these isomagnetic shields would be pretty useful.
Power would come from the same source that drives the climber (whatever that is...).
Earth-based uses? (Score:2)
slow progress (Score:2)
This is an approach that's been worked on for years and years now, and there hasn't been any rapid progress. Electromagnetic shielding may ultimately work, but it has a lot of problems to overcome. Without some kind of significant technological progress, the radiation dose for astronauts going to Mars is a real showstopper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays [wikipedia.org]
Engineers have studied a variety of electromagnetic field configurations for this. Electric fields have a problem because any
We have the energy source! (Score:2)
"Now we just need a viable interstellar drive, and an energy source to power it all."
We just need an interstellar drive now. Oh, that and someone to teach that pink bunny how to pilot the ship, after all, his back is going to be plugged into the warp drive.
-Charlie
does this mean tin foil hats are out of vogue? (Score:2)
the new "in" fashion statement amongst the crackpots will be magnets tied to your head to protect from alien radiation?
Discovered? Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is Robert Winglee's M2P2 [washington.edu]. He Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion. His original idea was to use it as an innovative type of solar sail, but it quickly became obvious that it could be used in the way that these people have stated. All in all, nothing to see here, already been done, and here in the US too. You might also enjoy checking out his page [washington.edu], the guy is a big time plasma nerd.
Re:Oblig ... (Score:5, Funny)
From Instructor: Now we're going to practice our impact procedures. Ok everyone lean to the left.
*Whole class but one guy leans to the left*
From Instructor: Good! Now lean to the right.
*Whole class but same one guy leans to the right*
From Instructor: Excellent! Your prepared for when the ship takes damage.
From The One Guy: Uh? Why are we leaning to the left and right like that?
*Instructor hands him a red shirt*
From Instructor: Keep your insurance paid up son.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
We all know the reason they were shook about during engagements with the enemy was due to the fact energy transferred from the enemy's weapon to the shields and finally to the ships gravity plating [memory-alpha.org].
Re:What if you don't want to deflect? (Score:5, Insightful)
You only need to protect the occupants and sensitive equipment. You can just put the ramscoop out ahead of the magnetic protection field.
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Re:sure it can melt 500 lbs of copper... (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone know what the standard made-up unit is for energy/time?
Sadly, we don't need a made-up unit for that. The one we have is bad enough:
Horses
Parent