Solar Wind Generator - Space Craft Magnetic Shield
Posted: Thu Nov 06, 2008 9:43 am
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http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/20 ... ld-ag.html
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http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/20 ... ld-ag.html
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There are links at the url.A better option is to use the system that's kept us safe for so long, magnetic fields, and thanks to recent work by Rutherford Laboratories, the Instituto Superior Técnico Lisbon and the Universities of York and Strathclyde that may now be possible. Simulations backed up by experiment have shown that magnetic fields only a few hundred meters across could block the deadly radiation, improving on previous results which demanded prohibitively large fields a hundred kilometers across. At which point you're not so much building a spaceship as launching a small province (of course the ship doesn't have to be as large as the field, but a 100 km field demands an awful lot of coil.)
These experiments involved generating a tiny piece of solar wind, which is awesome, made possible by decades of fusion power research, which makes it even more awesome.