Did this woman just invent the rocket that will take us to Mars? | Scientific and technical news

Dr Fatima Ebrahimi invented a new concept of a fusion rocket thruster that could propel humans to Mars and beyond.

The physicist who works for the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has designed the rocket that will use magnetic fields to project particles of plasma – an electrically charged gas – into the vacuum of space.

According to Newton’s Second and Third Laws of Motion, conservation of momentum would mean the rocket was propelled forward – and at speeds 10 times faster than comparable devices.

While current space-proven plasma propulsion engines use electric fields to propel the particles, the new rocket design would accelerate them using magnetic reconnection.

This process is found throughout the universe, but it is most observable for humanity on the surface of the sun. When the magnetic field lines converge there, before separating and then reconnecting, they produce an enormous amount of energy.

Similar energy is produced inside torus-shaped machines known as tokamaks, a magnetic containment device that is also a prime candidate for a practical nuclear fusion reactor.

“I’ve been cooking this concept for quite some time,” said Dr. Fatima Ebrahimi, PPPL’s ​​senior research physicist, whose article detailing the invention appeared in the Journal of Plasma Physics.

“I got the idea in 2017 when I was sitting on a bridge and thinking about the similarities between a car’s exhaust and the high-speed exhaust particles created by the national torus experiment. spherical (NSTX) from PPPL, ”she said.

The NSTX is the precursor to the lab’s current flagship fusion facility, which is currently under investigation with funding from the US Department of Energy.

“During its operation, this tokamak produces magnetic bubbles called plasmoids that travel at around 20 kilometers per second, which seemed to me a bit like a push,” added Dr. Ebrahimi.

Nuclear fusion is the power that drives the sun and the stars. It combines light elements in the form of plasma – the hot, charged state of matter made up of free electrons and atomic nuclei that make up 99% of the visible universe – to generate massive amounts of energy.

If a reactor operating on the same principles could be recreated on Earth, it would provide “virtually inexhaustible power to generate electricity” according to the PPPl.

Dr Ebrahimi’s new concept performs much better than existing plasma thrusters in computer simulations – generating exhaust gases with speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second, 10 times faster than other thrusters.

This faster speed at the start of a spacecraft’s journey could put the outer planets within reach of astronauts, the physicist said.

“Long-distance trips take months or years because the specific impulse of chemical rocket engines is very low, so the craft takes a while to level up,” she said.

“But if we make thrusters based on magnetic reconnection, then we could perform long-range missions in a shorter time frame.”

She pointed out that her propellant concept stems directly from her research on fusion energy. “This work was inspired by past fusion work and this is the first time that plasmoids and reconnection have been proposed for space propulsion,” said Dr Ebrahimi. “The next step is to build a prototype!”