The "Impossible" Engine is real, NASA says so!

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Wow this sounds incredible if true. But I guess it's too early to be enthusiastic about it. Give them time to find out if they're right.
Can you imagine what people thought of quantum mechanics when the people first started talking about it? That's the great thing about science, it is always progressing and things can always change.
 
I wonder if this would be helpful to our probes? Maybe we can finally send one to Europa?

Perhaps we can now build some probes that come and go from planets, rather than just stay and die?

Or hell, that Mars colony thing. Maybe now we can make it a NOT one way trip?
 
Eteric Rice said:
I wonder if this would be helpful to our probes? Maybe we can finally send one to Europa?

Perhaps we can now build some probes that come and go from planets, rather than just stay and die?

Or hell, that Mars colony thing. Maybe now we can make it a NOT one way trip?
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We can do all those already, except the last one requires some extensive and expensive planning and engineering but is not impossible by any means.
And given that currently this EmDrive has, if it even actually works and isn't some odd missed thing like that FTL neutrino thing was revealed to be, rather minimal thrust, it isn't going to change one bit anytime soon.
 
startyourengine said:
i think this is exactly what it is. somebody at NASA fucked up. there is no way this is true.
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I'd agree but this is the third group doing their own tests on similar drives with the same findings. (The first was done in the UK by the inventor, the second by a Chinese university, NASA's test was essentially supposed to prove them wrong and put the subject to rest... ...but it didn't. That's why it's getting people's attention.)

The Chinese drive actually produced over twice the thrust using less power.

...the Chinese drive which is in turn based on Shawyer's EmDrive, produced 91 mN of thrust for 17 watts of power, compared to the 40 mN of thrust from 28 watts for the Cannae drive.
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and apparently capable of 720mN

5. Even if it works, how can such a small thrust push a spacecraft?

The thrust was low because this is a very low-powered apparatus. The Chinese have demonstrated a system using kilowatts rather than watts of power that produces a push of 720 millinewtons. This is enough to lift a couple of ounces, making it competitive with modern space drives. The difference is that this drive doesn't require any propellant, which usually takes up a lot of launch weight and places a limit on how long other drives can operate for.

The Nasa paper says "the expected thrust to power for initial flight applications is expected to be in the 0.4 newton per kilowatt electric (N/kWe) range, which is about seven times higher than the current state of the art Hall thruster in use on orbit today."
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I wonder. No one apparently knows the reason for why it works, not necessarily unusual in itself in the history of science, after all science does come from the will to know what causes observed things, but i reckon knowing why would also give us its limits.
And there are going to be limits.
There can be some odd things, like photon drive (any flashlight or laser is one strictly speaking) but the thrust is so small it is almost non-existent. Physical limitation. We don't need to test a photon drive to know this, you need 300 megawatts for one newton of thrust for light or any electromagnetic radiation.
Perhaps EmDrive produces thrust... But what if it is something like omnidirectional, that is it doesn't simply move anywhere because it pushes everywhere equally? EDIT just throwing some random ideas, things NASA and others probably have considered.
 
Evan Innes called from beyond the grave and wants his Shaw drive back. Sort of creepy parallel to his books damn.
 
Woorloog said:
I wonder. No one apparently knows the reason for why it works, not necessarily unusual in itself in the history of science, after all science does come from the will to know what causes observed things, but i reckon knowing why would also give us its limits.
And there are going to be limits.
There can be some odd things, like photon drive (any flashlight or laser is one strictly speaking) but the thrust is so small it is almost non-existent. Physical limitation. We don't need to test a photon drive to know this, you need 300 megawatts for one newton of thrust for light or any electromagnetic radiation.
Perhaps EmDrive produces thrust... But what if it is something like omnidirectional, that is it doesn't simply move anywhere because it pushes everywhere equally? EDIT just throwing some random ideas, things NASA and others probably have considered.
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The point of the tests were to prove it was directional thrust, all three groups who have built their own versions have tested and claim that they produce directional thrust.
 
Nostremitus said:
The point of the tests were to prove it was directional thrust, all three groups testing reported that it is directional.
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Hmm. Right. Forgot about that.
Anyway, i reckon that at some point someone will figure out something that makes it a mere historical footnote. Not that i'd like that to happen, i just figure it is too good to be true.
 
New testing further confirms force measurements. Next step is independent verification and validation. Tests were done at Eagleworks Lab, a NASA sponsored facility.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/02/more-emdrive-experiment-information.html?m=1

The current plan is to support an IV&V test campaign at the Glenn Research Center (GRC) using their low thrust torsion pendulum followed by a repeat campaign at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) using their low thrust torsion pendulum.
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This makes me very excited for the future of space travel.
 
I was expecting this thread to get bumping eventually, but never did I expect it was for further confirmation. I was so sure this was going to be debunked. I guess I'll keep my eye on it.
 
HxkISNt.gif


Nothing is impossible.
 
Oh shit. I was just searching for follow-ups to this news a week or two ago and found nothing, so I assumed that it was probably going to amount to nothing. Excited to hear that they are still testing it and the initial results still seem to be holding up!
 
:o. I'll be surprised if this actually manifests in reality. I guess I'll have to keep a close eye on the progress.
 
What if the secret to FTL is incredibly simple yet completely breaks the laws of physics and it's only a fluke we haven't discovered it yet? Like out of Harry Turtledove's short story The Road Not Taken .
 
This is the important part right here:

Based on test data and theoretical model development, the expected thrust to power for initial flight applications is expected to be in the 0.4 newton per kilowatt electric (N/kWe) range, which is about seven times higher than the current state of the art Hall thruster in use on orbit today.
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This would allow for a 246-day mission to Mars that includes a 70-day stay on the planet. That is a lot shorter than the current 400-450 days a proposed Mars mission would last using current thruster technology.
 
Very promising!
 
This is surreal and amazing. I've been waiting..wishing for a breakthrough like this in my lifetime. I hope it's not smoke and mirrors.
 
I'm going to be slightly annoyed if this all works out, too. My brother is one of those types who is educated enough to learn about lots of speculative science, but not rational enough to doubt it ever. So he's constantly talking about all these thing scientists say "might be" possible as if they're confirmed to work and everything will change in just a few short years. This is one of the few things he's obsessed with. And last time the story broke, he was so excited, with his "I Told You So"s and I've been saying "Let's wait and see. There still hasn't been that much verification. The rational position is to wait." So if he's right, he gets to feel all high and mighty, even if he was right for the wrong reasons.

But I guess it would be worth it.
 
EskimoJoe said:
I'm going to be slightly annoyed if this all works out, too. My brother is one of those types who is educated enough to learn about lots of speculative science, but not rational enough to doubt it ever. So he's constantly talking about all these thing scientists say "might be" possible as if they're confirmed to work and everything will change in just a few short years. This is one of the few things he's obsessed with. And last time the story broke, he was so excited, with his "I Told You So"s and I've been saying "Let's wait and see. There still hasn't been that much verification. The rational position is to wait." So if he's right, he gets to feel all high and mighty, even if he was right for the wrong reasons.

But I guess it would be worth it.
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:lol,

I love it when a feature of someone you love is so irksome that, even though you know being wrong is a major breakthrough for humanity, you want to be right anyway.
 
Htown said:
can somebody please explain this to me like i'm a damn moron?
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it uses electricity to create a thrust force equivalent to a piece of paper sitting on your hand. Doesn't sound like much but chemical rockets or a nuclear explosion could get us upto a decent speed then you turn of the EM and it'll maintain speed and build speed.
 
gutshot said:
This is the important part right here:



This would allow for a 246-day mission to Mars that includes a 70-day stay on the planet. That is a lot shorter than the current 400-450 days a proposed Mars mission would last using current thruster technology.
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Okay, so I'm no physics major. Can you break it down and tell me what speed 1 KG of matter could be accelerated with the thrust you quoted.

Also, does this engine appear to be scalable? Can larger ones that draw more power be built and producer greater speeds? If a ship with this engine was built and powered by the smallest nuclear reactor we can build, how fast could it potentially go? I'm thinking of something around the size of a Seawolf-class nuclear submarine.
 
Lead Based Paint said:
Could you show me where you're reading them? I'd love to read them myself.
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This is from the article. I don't really understand much of it.

Overall though the blue ribbon panel's experimentalists appeared to be pleased with our previous and upcoming lab work. However they ripped into Sonny's QVF/MHD conjecture because it relies on the quantum vacuum being mutable and engineer-able whereas the current physics mainstream thinks that the quantum vacuum is an immutable ground energy state of the universe that can-NOT be used to convey energy or momentum as proposed by Dr. White. However they brushed aside Sonny's QVF based derivation of the Bohr hydrogen atom electron radius as a "mathematical coincidence" and didn't have a word to say what the Casimir effect and other quantum vacuum phenomenon were caused by, that can only occur only if the QV is mutable and can convey energy and momentum. So Sonny and Jerry Vera took it upon themselves last fall to increase this mathematical coincidence from one to more than 47 times as they explored the QV created atomic electron shell radii for atoms up to atomic number 7 all based on the QV being the root cause for all of it including the origins of the electron and all other subatomic particles.

[In Paul March's Opinion] Jim Woodward's Mach-Effect (M-E) conjecture that is based primarily on SRT (Standard Relativity Theory] and GRT [General Relativity Theory], is still in the running for a way to explain his and our test results to date. However the M-E also has its detractors since it requires that instantaneous Wheeler/Feynman radiation reaction forces being required between a local time varying mass and all the other mass/energy in the casually connected universe, since this mechanism is used to balance the M-E's energy and momentum conservation books. In the end analysis though I think that the ME will rest on the quantum nature of space-time, since in Woodward's eyes the gravitational field IS space-time, and in our eyes GRT's space-time is in reality the quantum vacuum that probably has at least 4 spatial dimensions and one time dimension.
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Say they definitively confirm it works. How would current research in related fields be shifted and what would be the next milestone to strive for?
 
Better than Hall Thrusters is good, but not "get us to Mars good" by any stretch of the imagination.

Hall Effect thrusters are highly efficient, but still very very low thrust, only suitable for slowly moving position of a satellites orbit.

I mean, It took 9 months to move the AUHF satellites orbital perigee from 170 miles to 2900 miles with Hall Thrusters. Seven times that thrust is good, but we're still only talking about move a satellites position kind of good, not get a man to Mars good.
 
SG-17 said:
Okay, so I'm no physics major. Can you break it down and tell me what speed 1 KG of matter could be accelerated with the thrust you quoted.

Also, does this engine appear to be scalable? Can larger ones that draw more power be built and producer greater speeds?
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Unfortunately I'm not a physics major either and barely understand most of that article.

As to whether the engine is scalable, I think that remains to be seen. The author does include a figure with a hypothetical engine that is 10x as powerful and it would result in a ridiculous 140-day round-trip mission to Mars with a 90-day stay on the surface. That would be completely game changing, but again, it remains to be seen whether those sort of returns are feasible.
 
KidGalactus said:
Isn't this like the 4th time it's been verified?

I'm not a space weirdo, or anything, but this does seem different than the neutrino incident a couple of years ago.

Something interesting does seem to be happening.
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Yeah, this is just far beyond my understanding of physics, but it looks like some basic assumptions regarding the quantum vacuum are incorrect (which sounds like it might be huge), which might be pretty huge.

Remains to see if this can be used in an actual spaceship though.
 
LQX said:
The last people I except to be such skeptics are scientist. These are the people that should think almost anything is possible when it comes to space right?
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Extraordinary theories need extraordinary evidence.
Nothing strange.
Remember Andrea Rossi' Low-Energy Cold Fusion Reactor.
 
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