Reaching for the Stars

Mars in 6 weeks? And back in a total of four months? That's the prediction of a design team working on antimatter rocket concepts at Pennsylvania State University. But first, you have to get the stuff - and store it. (PSU)

The popular belief is that an antimatter particle coming in contact with its matter counterpart yields energy. That's true for electrons and positrons (anti-electrons). They'll produce gamma rays at 511,000 electron volts.

But heavier particles like protons and anti-protons are somewhat messier, making gamma rays and leaving a spray of secondary particles that eventually decay into neutrinos and low-energy gamma rays.

And that is partly what Schmidt and others want in an antimatter engine. The gamma rays from a perfect reaction would escape immediately, unless the ship had thick shielding, and serve no purpose. But the charged debris from a proton/anti-proton annihilation can push a ship.

"We want to get as close as possible to the initial annihilation event," Schmidt explained. What's important is intercepting some of the pions and other charged particles that are produced and using the energy to produce thrust."

So our history here in this blog has detailed how we see the issues of "collision processes developed(Cern), that we may now see the cosmological playground teaming with the opportunities to produce this "stuff" that would send our spaceships to Mars?

The extension of the thinking of experimental development, has allowed us to think of "what is possible" and what this propulsion system can do, as we make our way into the new territories? As we set sail our ships, searching for those new lands.


A Penn State artist's concept of n antimatter-powered Mars ship with equipment and crew landers at the right, and the engine, with magnetic nozzles, at left.

Of course "storage" is always a troubling issue here so they developed what is call the Penning Trap. But it is not without some insight that our geometrical understanding developed in the events in the cosmos, could not be transformed in that same geometrical sense to propel those ships?


This "Penning trap" developed at Penn State University stores antiprotons.

It sounds like science fiction, but researchers are learning to create and store small amounts of antimatter in real-life labs. A portable electromagnetic antimatter trap at Penn State University, for example, can hold 10 billion antiprotons. If we could learn how to use such antimatter safely, we could impinge some on a thin stream of hydrogen gas to create thrust. Alternatively, a little antimatter could be injected into a fusion reactor to lower the temperatures needed to trigger a fusion reaction.

So you ask how is that possible?

The gravitational collapse sets up the very ideas for us as we make use of that "propulsion system" to move that space ship. So in a sense, "the collider process" at Cern is a gigantic model of what we want in the developmental process as the new engine of our spaceship.


A schematic of the heart of a Penning trap where a cloud of antiprotons (the fuzzy bluish spot) is kept cold and quiet by liquid nitrogen and helium and a stable magnetic field. (PSU)

Anti-protons, explained Dr. Gerald Smith of Pennsylvania State University, can be obtained in modest quantities from high-energy accelerators slamming particles into solid targets. The anti-protons are then collected and held in a magnetic bottle

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While previously here I have spoken about how we may use Susskind's thought experiment as a monitoring system of gravitational considerations, it is also this thought process that helps us adjust the ship according to how much thrust is needed in face of the lagrangian views we encounter in star systems?

However, by using "matter/antimatter annihilation", velocities just below the speed of light could be reached, making it possible to reach the next star in about six years.

I think Stephen Hawking is going to have to work faster, in order to elucidate his thoughts on this travel. That while I may have started this lesson from the idea of 1999, it is much more advanced then many had understood. The "experimental process" of Cern is much greater then most of us had realized.

Also there is a developmental "thought pattern" that needs to be understood as we speak about how such a geometrics could have been seen underneath the very structures of our realities. Not only within the cosmos at large but in the dynamical processes of the quantum world.

Angels and Demons



Cern IMagery takes a "dramatic position" on what it is saying about itself? :) I would like to think that the fun is in how "mirror world" has somehow been transposed into what we know of the develpmental processes we are given as we now lok at what may help us move into the cosmos.

If as a society we were "uncultured" we might have thought the tribal influence of the "bad side" of all things? But in that exploratory sense al the tidbits had to add up to something, yet without our understanding of what lies beneath, one might have never gone "past" Robert Mclaughlin, to realize, the geometrical nature that imbues the process we are developing.



This was Riemann lesson to Gauss in his thesis, who like his student had thought for sure "vision capable now," would also have been transferred into a "whole new world" of understanding of the non euclidean geometries.

What do they say about the devil being in the details?

Plato:

This image had horns drawn on it, with a tail attached. Something about “angels and demons?” I don’t think we should take the “anti” too literal in face of an outcome, or should we?

It's about how we can take a legitimate process and build ideas on it, according to the very nature of the "negative and positive expressions" of what Riemann set out to do.

ON a large scale, we see the dynamics of this process, yet failed to see it work at a microcosmic sense as we deal with the colliders? As we move forward in the propulsion systems, it is importance how we see this developmental process take on dynamic views.