Even though nobody has an idea of how these new engines actually work, some tests from NASA are showing that they do. The "EM Drive." doesn't use or require any sort of fuel to produce thrust, instead it bounces microwaves into a closed chamber that ideally will push a spacecraft. The theory behind this goes against Newtons third law of Motion that says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The EM Drive isn't believed to be causing an action, yet is still creating the reaction (i.e. the thrust.)
Weirdly, the EmDrive doesn’t expel anything at all, and that doesn’t make sense in light of Newton’s third law or another tenet of classical mechanics, the conservation of momentum. If the EmDrive moves forward without expelling anything out the back, then there’s no opposing force to explain the thrust. It’s a bit like arguing that a person inside a car could propel it forward by repeatedly hitting the steering wheel, or that the crew of a spaceship could fly the craft to their destination simply by pushing on the walls.
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Why this is so exciting is that the need of carrying rocket fuel has been THE limiting factor of how far we can travel from Earth. Since there are no "gas stations" in space, each spacecraft has to launch with what it needs. What we run into here is that to carry extra fuel allowing us to travel further, requires more fuel to actually launch the spacecraft off the earth. Couple this with it costing roughly $10,000 per 1 pound and it becomes way to expensive to just load it up with extra "gas tanks."
This is where the EM Drive comes in. It needs zero fuel to be carried with it, running solely on electricity that can be generated with solar panels. Should this research pan out, many think that this could provide us with the ability to travel to places previous thought to out of reach. Some people have also been claiming that this could be the key to developing "Warp Drives" like we've seen in popular science fiction shows.
First designed in 2001 by aerospace engineer Roger Shawyer, the technology can be summed up as a propellantless propulsion system, meaning the engine doesn’t use fuel to cause a reaction. Removing the need for fuel makes a craft substantially lighter, and therefore easier to move (and cheaper to make, theoretically). In addition, the hypothetical drive is able to reach extremely high speeds — we’re talking potentially getting humans to the outer reaches of the solar system in a matter of months.
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So let's take a minute to see where the testing of this new technology is currently. Most the time when there is a claim that a something is breaking the laws of physics, it turns out to not be the case when more in depth testing is performed and calculations are checked. However just because something doesn't follow our current understanding of how the universe works, doesn't always make it false either. Once in a while something amazing is found when our current models say something we see happening shouldn't be, such as relativity or quantum mechanics. This is how new leaps in science are sometimes made.
The inventor of the EM Drive, Roger Shawyer, build a prototype in 2003 to demonstrate the generation of thrust which measured about 16 milliNewtons (the weight of about two peanuts.) He was at first attacked by skeptics more on a conceptual basis versus actually delving in to test his experiment directly, purely saying that it breaks Newtons third law, so it would never work. Shawyer still kept going to create more advanced demonstrations that to ensure "that the test results are valid and not the result of air currents, friction, ionization, interference or electromagnetic effects."
In 2009 a group of Chinese scientists at the Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xi'an confirmed they built an EM Drive and "were able to produce 720 milliNewtons of force — but even then, nobody really believed it." This thrust would move the equivalent of a modern cell phone. Their paper titled "Net thrust measurement of propellantless microwave thruster" has been translated into English and is available to read. The US hasn't always believed claims from the Chinese, often believing them to be somewhat outlandish.
Recently NASA released the research paper with their findings and published their findings in a peer reviewed Journal of Propulsion and Power. While this doesn't mean that the science and experimentation behind this will turn out to be correct, it has at least been signed off on by other scientists that attest to it being reasonable. NASA's experiment was tested at 40, 60 and 80 Watt power levels, with the conclusion being that their test engine produced 1.2 milliNewtons of thrust per kilowatt in a vacuum. Putting this into perspective, the state of the art drive in use by NASA produces 60 milliNewtons per kW (think of the engines on the space shuttle) and the other fuel-less options such as the solar sail, laser propulsion or photon rockets create thrust per unit of power in the ranges of 0.0033–0.0067 mN/kW.
You can watch an excellent 3 minute video covering the NASA tests here!
In the end I find this an intriguing line of research to follow with the great potential it might provide for us should it turn out to be true. With the current tiny amounts of thrust being tested, there are a lot of external factors that could be causing the effect instead of the drive itself. Even in the NASA paper there are 9 sources of error that they touch on that could invalidate their findings including air currents, radio frequency interference, magnetic interaction, thermal expansion/contraction, vibration, electrostatic interaction, gassing, photon rocket force/radio frequency leakage, and uncertainty in impulsive/thermal signal decoupling.
Regardless, I will be watching this research as time goes along and see what the experimenters and peer reviewers find on this possible game changing technology.
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Em Drive Ship
Em Drive