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Solar Wind Generator - Space Craft Magnetic Shield

Posted: Thu Nov 06, 2008 9:43 am
by MSimon
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http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/20 ... ld-ag.html

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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.
There are links at the url.

Posted: Thu Nov 06, 2008 10:15 am
by Betruger
Very cool, but unfortunately it's still 15-20 years away by one of the researchers' own admission. With some luck, some shortcuts will be found by then.