On 2/7/2016 11:44 AM, David Weinshenker wrote:
On 02/06/2016 05:47 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:I do recall that when the M2P2 "Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion" system was being proposed as a flight demo, their target mission was a heliopause probe - which I took as an indication that they were pretty sure that the thing would accelerate roughly outwards from the sun, and fast, but with little hope for actually *steering* it...
On Sat, 6 Feb 2016, Uwe Klein wrote:
what about using the particles from the solar wind?
They already carry a load. you need a B or H field for manipulation.
There have been many proposals. The plasma physics is dauntingly
complex and not well understood. Simulating every particle is
computationally impractical -- yes, even today, and for the foreseeable
future too -- and the scaling laws for collective plasma behavior are
uncertain, so lab experiments aren't that useful either. Such systems
might have to be debugged by flight test, and that's a *really* hard
sell to today's funding agencies, which typically are reluctant to
invest in flight hardware unless success is nearly certain.
So it sounds like what we would really need to do at this point
would be to call the test system an "instrument on a solar wind
plasma science mission", then...