Physicist’s fusion rocket idea can unlock long-distance space travel

Dr. Fatima Ebrahimi, a physicist at the US Department of Energy, invented a new type of rocket thruster that could power deep space exploration.

Dr Ebrahimi works at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and has developed a design that uses a magnetic field to project particles of plasma into space.

Using a magnetic field, pilots could tailor the amount of thrust depending on the mission and the spacecraft’s destination.

Current plasma propulsion devices (electrically charged gas particles) use electric fields to propel them. But exploiting a magnetic reconnection would result in a much greater acceleration. Dr. Ebrahimi’s thruster could, in theory, travel 10 times faster than comparable devices.

The idea is one that already exists in space. When the magnetic fields on the sun’s surface separate and reconnect, they produce an enormous amount of energy. A similar explosion is created inside special machines called tokamaks, which are a prime candidate for the design of a potential nuclear fusion reactor.

“I’ve been cooking this concept for a while,” she wrote in an article detailing the invention for the Journal of Plasma Physics.

“ I got the idea in 2017 while I was sitting on a bridge and pondering the similarities between a car’s exhaust and the high-speed exhaust particles created by the National Experience of PPPL spherical torus (NSTX), ” she wrote.

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

If the idea can be turned into reality, this new type of rocket thruster could get us to Mars much faster. In computer simulations, it generates exhaust gases with speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second.

Taking into account Newton’s second law of motion (resulting force = mass × acceleration), this bodes very well for very rapid movements in space.

“Long-distance travel takes months or even years because the specific impulse of chemical rocket motors is very low, so the craft takes time to level up,” Dr. Ebrahimi wrote. .

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

Scientists explained that the concept comes directly from work 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,” wrote Dr Ebrahimi.

“The next step is to build a prototype!

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