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A researcher at the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Fatima Ebrahimi, has developed a new type of thruster that could help humans explore space in the future. The new thruster uses magnetic fields to cause plasma particles to be projected at the back of a rocket propelling the spacecraft forward. Plasma is the fourth state of matter and is an electrically charged gas.
The concept accelerates particles using magnetic reconnection, a natural process found throughout the universe, including the surface of the sun. Magnetic reconnection occurs when magnetic field lines converge, suddenly separate, and then come together, producing significant amounts of energy. The researcher said she had been working on the concept for some time, with the original idea coming back in 2017.
The idea came to her as she sat on a bridge, thinking about the similarities between the car’s exhaust and the high-speed exhaust particles created by the National Spherical Taurus experiment in the lab. During the operation, the tokamak produces magnetic bubbles called plasmoids, moving at about 20 kilometers per second. Ebrahimi says it looked a lot like him.
Current plasma thrusters use electric fields to propel the particles and can only produce a low specific velocity. Computer simulations performed on computers in the lab show that the new plasma thruster concept can generate exhaust gases with speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second, which is ten times faster than other thrusters.
The speed of the plaster at the start of the spacecraft’s journey could bring the outer planets within range of astronauts, resulting in long-range space travel taking less time. The new thruster has stronger magnetic fields which can increase or decrease the amount of thrust, allowing fine tuning of speed. The thruster also ejects plasma particles and plasmoids, the latter of which add power to the propulsion. The new thruster can also be made of heavy or light atoms to adapt the thrust to the mission.
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