It’s Official: NASA’s Physics Defying EM Drive Just Passed Peer Review

fossbytes.com ^ | Adarsh Verma

[BenLurkin]

M Drive, the microwave radiation thruster capable of propelling a spacecraft without any fuel, has been heating up the debates over the past couple of years. The concept of EM Drive has been facing harsh criticism as it appears to violate the Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

In a recent development, a full and official peer-reviewed paper on EM Drive has been published online. This paper has appeared via the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)’s Journal of Propulsion and Power.

While the publication of this paper doesn’t guarantee EM Drive’s real world applications, it surely approves the methodology of the experiments. It also confirms that NASA’s EM Drive constantly produces 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt of thrust in a vacuum.

[DariusBane]

You probably have a great practical understanding of Newtonian physics but the quantum stuff just blows your and my mind.

[marktwain]

I tried to find a date for the article. Looks like it is based on a study published online on 17 November, 2016.

That definitely makes it recent, and news.

[PJBankard]

Misread, so it’s an enclosed conical container with a dielectric resonator at the end. Still, the current hypotheses are that results were noise/experiment error, measurement error, radiation pressure, virtual plasma, quantized inertia, or photon leakage. The experimenters from previous tests believe that the above are the most likely.

[BenLurkin]

Interesting!

[steve86]

Maybe try to get your comment deleted now that the locus of dumbness has been elucidated?

[LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget]

It is huge since it is reactionless thrust. Hook a plutonium reactor to it, pump in a few hundred or thousand kilowatts and the speeds you can achieve are astronomical. Things like to Mars in a week. To Jupiter in a week and a half. To Pluto in 2 weeks.

[LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget]

The microwaves do not come out of the cavity. It is sealed. It does not fit existing understanding of Physics.

[wally_bert]

Bistromathics will make Infinite Improbability obsolete.

[steve86]

Of course, it remains to be seen how this effect scales in practice, but I believe the initial usefulness will be more in continuous moderate thrust over a long period than a top fuel nitro type of drag race spaceship.

[wally_bert]

I want blasters modeled on the Mauser like Han Solo carried. Can’t beat a good blaster.

[wally_bert]

The watermelons would sue for endless environmental impact studies saying the universe is too fragile for any radiation we might generate.

[wally_bert]

Ya canna break the laws of physics laddie.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

It doesn’t defy the laws of physics. It focuses and amplifies microwaves to generate thrust.

It still requires something to generate electricity, but it doesn’t require propellant. If you could supply a spacecraft with a large enough nuclear generator, you could fly around for quite a while.

We’ll have to wait and see how this develops.

[VRW Conspirator]

I am surprised no mentioned the invention that made this possible, the flux capacitor.

[Manly Warrior]

Great, so where does all the kW of electricity come from? A long extension cord or a huge tank of prpane and oxygen, or nuke /steam generator?

[seastay]

The cavity is closed on both ends, and is resonant like a bell at a few Ghz. There is a dielectric disk capped on one end, while the whole enclosures is sealed in metal, basically a Faraday cage. A signal of a few hundred watts was fed into the cavity, and then it was tapped out, recirculated through and RF amp, and pumped back in,, its a feed back circuit. Think of a hot mic feeding back in an auditorium, then re amplifying and tuning the whole EQ to the resonant ringing tone,, that's what's going on inside. At one end there is a dielectric disk which for all practical purposes is the equivalent of placing a pizza on the bottom of a microwave oven, and turning it on, then telling everybody the oven is lifting off the table..... the paper says there could be errors in the measurement of the lift because the thrust measured is extremely small.... nobody is really reading this paper, everyone is just parroting the press releases , and the fact that it was “peer”reviewed means what ? Consider man made global warming is also peer reviewed..... I'm still skeptical for example the thrust measured could be just simple thermal expansion from the release of the heat cooking the pizza puck in the cavity..... read for yourself here

http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/1.B36120

[faithhopecharity]

Can it receive a bough light way way out there?

[LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget]

50 kilograms of thrust over a week on a smallish spaceship puts it to astronomical speeds. Even 5 kg of thrust over time is huge. To get propellant to space is hugely costly. The way we do it now is a very short burn, and then coast the rest of the way. Lets suppose the burn gives 1000 kg of thrust. The 5 Kg starts slow and keeps adding up. Before you know it those 5 KG second after second hour after hour day after day can yield orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude ad infinitum more thrust than chemical propellants. Wont get you out of a planetary gravity well, but once out there WOWSERS.

[Manly Warrior]

Great, so where does all the kW of electricity come from? A long extension cord or a huge tank of prpane and oxygen, or nuke /steam generator?

[LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget]

The plutonium batteries on things like voyager are steam based? Who knew. ;-)