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First Exotic Space Thruster Test Ends in Explosion
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri May 23, 2008 04:47 PM
from the not-the-fireworks-they-were-hoping-for dept.
from the not-the-fireworks-they-were-hoping-for dept.
KentuckyFC writes "A NASA-funded test of an entirely new way to control orbiting satellites has ended with the prototype arcing dangerously and parts of the machine exploding. The new propulsion system is based on the Lorentz force: that a charged particle moving through a magnetic field experiences a force perpendicular to both its velocity and the field. So the plan is to ensure that a satellite passing though the Earth's magnetic field is electrically charged so as to generate a force that can be used to steer the spacecraft. The advantage of the idea is that it requires no propellant, which is a big deal since most satellites' lifespans are limited by the amount of fuel they can carry. But the first ground-based tests haven't gone entirely to plan."
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I hope (Score:5, Funny)
Explosions are an indicator of work (Score:5, Insightful)
Percy Spencer (microwave oven): "...and then the egg exploded."
James Watt (steam engine): "...and then the boiler exploded."
Alfred Nobel (dynamite): "...and then the nitroglycerin-soaked soil exploded."
Vladmir Titov (Russian cosmonaut): "...and then the Soyuz rocket exploded."
Werner von Braun (NASA engineer): "...and then the Jupiter rocket exploded."
Yang Liwei (Chinese Taikonaut): "...and then the Long March rocket exploded."
Sony test engineer: "...and then the battery exploded."
J. Robert Openheimer: "...and then the Trinity device exploded"...oh wait, that was supposed to happen.
A more personal anecdote:
Someone in the shop at work needed a simple room-temperature dryer for a special project, so he got some large diameter PVC pipe that was handy, filled it with a desiccant, put the material in that needed drying, and screwed the cap on. Then he left it alone for a few hours.
Apparently some sort of gas-producing chemical reaction took place, probably helped by the sun shining through the open door, (...wait for it...) and then the drying chamber exploded, blasting the plastic lid through the ceiling 25 feet overhead and covering the work bay with the tiny pellets of desiccant.
Engineering is fun.
Parent
Heh (Score:5, Funny)
I'm pretty certain this is how Mythbusters got started.
Also from TFA: Obviously, a proplusion system that explodes while it is in operation needs some more work.
I dunno, kinda sounds like how rockets work.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Funny)
(Orion programme if my memory isn't failing)
(On that point when will which ever god or other deity is responsible for our design fix the bloody faulty memory unit and start using error correcting cells?)
Parent
Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
It's Rocket Science (Score:5, Funny)
Sure, you got the basic points all right. Now, let's see some advanced stuff:
It should go like this [youtube.com]
NOT like this [youtube.com].
Parent
Re:It's Rocket Science (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:It's Rocket Science (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
All new technology generates it's share of failures along the way. In the early days NASA blew up a lot of rockets in the process of learning to get them in to space. As long as we're using it on unmanned craft (or on the bench), a decent rate of failures is alright by me if they're learning something from them.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Funny)
So I'm glad I got burned think of all the things we learned
For the people who are still alive
Parent
Dirty (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dirty (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Doesn't seem like a significant setback. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure why this is a big deal. Couldn't they just use a different kind of solder, or at least insulate vulnerable electronics from the charge?
Re:Doesn't seem like a significant setback. (Score:5, Interesting)
But when I got to reading, they use the word "explosion" for solder. Solder is not big. It's not like a fuel tank went up - this is a little bit of electronics. That sounds like a smaller explosion than you get with your average match when you strike it.
That's like talking about buildings and saying there was a "collapse", and if you RTFA close enough you find what they're actually referring to is the water glass on the table in the lounge tipped over.
Honest perhaps, but definitely deceptive.
Parent
Need more coffee (Score:5, Funny)
best to discover flaws early (Score:5, Insightful)
Jazzing up the story a bit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Jazzing up the story a bit (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Jazzing up the story a bit (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, nevermind... Even then it's probably not a very impressive explosion.
It bothers me that the editors here simultaneously push the "we don't invest enough in space research" platform, and fall into the "journalistic" trap of sensationalizing NASA's failures to make their readers feel "smarter than those rocket scientist guys".
I have every expectation that the readers and comment writers on Slashdot have vastly differing opinions on the subject, but you'd think that the clearly biased editorial staff here could get their story straight.
Parent
Redefining your way to success! (Score:5, Funny)
Another variant also had problems. (Score:5, Informative)
They tried an experiment on this with the shuttle and a tether to a satellite they were launching, and found a problem: The motion along the orbit also causes it to act like a generator, powered by the orbital momentum. (This was known - and also has possible uses.) This produces a voltage gradient along the wire tether. So the tether has to be insulated to prevent arcing to the very low-pressure plasma that constitutes the high atmosphere and solar wind.
What they discovered was that minute flaws in the insulation caused localized arcs to the surrounding plasma. These were powered by the orbital motion relative to the earth's field and were very intense. They quickly melted through the thin tether.
So such a motor is not an impossibility. But it will require some heavy engineering work to get around this problem.
(It also says that large-scale tethered orbital structures have an additional problem to be solved: Keeping the tethers intact despite kilovolts of induced voltage along the tether and the resulting arcing.)
It's easy to think of space as filled with a hard vacuum. Unfortunately it's actually filled with very low pressure conductive plasma and near the Earth that's dense enough to be a major engineering issue.
dependant on earth's magnetic field? (Score:5, Interesting)
Mind you, when this begins, I suspect the last thing we would be worried about if/when this comes would be the odd satellite crashing back to earth.
They should have expected it. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a negatively charged target in a plasma the target will attract positive ions which will knock bits off of the target if they arrive with sufficient velocity, otherwise they'll stick and neutralize the charge. In a sputtering chamber we want those bits knocked off. If we're sputtering something non-metallic we need to use RF to keep it charged.
The only failed test... (Score:5, Insightful)
GO NASA!