Engineer Roger Shawyer’s controversial EM Drive thruster
jets back into relevancy this week, as a team of researchers at NASA’s
Eagleworks Laboratories recently completed yet
another round of testing on the seemingly impossible tech. Though no
official peer-reviewed lab paper has been published yet, and NASA
institutes strict press release restrictions on the Eagleworks lab these days,
engineer Paul March took to the NASA Spaceflight forum to
explain the group’s findings. In essence, by utilizing an improved
experimental procedure, the team managed to mitigate some of the errors from
prior tests — yet still found signals of unexplained thrust.
Isaac Newton should be sweating.
Flying in the face of traditional laws of physics, the EM
Drive makes use of a magnetron and microwaves to create a propellantless
propulsion system. By pushing microwaves into a closed, truncated cone and back
towards the small end of said cone, the drive creates the momentum and force necessary
to propel a craft forward. Because the system is a reactionless drive, it goes
against humankind’s fundamental comprehension of physics, hence its
controversial nature.
On the NASA spaceflight forums, March revealed as much as he could about the
advancements that have been made with EM Drive and its relative technology.
After apologizing for not having the ability to share pictures or the
supporting data from a peer-reviewed lab paper, he starts by explaining (as
straightforward as rocket science can get) that the Eagleworks lab successfully
built and installed a 2nd generation magnetic damper which helps reduce stray
magnetic fields in a vacuum chamber. The addition reduced magnetic fields by an
order of magnitude inside the chamber, and also decreased Lorentz
force interactions.
However, despite ruling out Lorentz forces almost entirely,
March still reported a contamination caused by thermal expansion.
Unfortunately, this reported contamination proves even worse in a vacuum (i.e.
outer space) due in large part to its inherently high level of insulation. To
combat this, March acknowledged the team is now developing an advanced analytics
tool to assist in the separation of the contamination, as well as an integrated
test which aims to alleviate thermally induced errors altogether.
While these advancements and additions are no doubt a boon
for continued research of the EM Drive, the fact that the machine still
produced what March calls “anomalous thrust signals” is by far the test’s
single biggest discovery. The reason why this thrust exists still confounds
even the brightest rocket scientists in the world, but the recurring phenomenon
of direction-based momentum does make the EM Drive appear less a
combination of errors and more like a legitimate answer to interstellar travel.
At this time, it’s unknown when Eagleworks Laboratories
intends to officially publish its peer-reviewed paper, however, hearing of the
EM Drive’s advancements from one of its top engineers bodes well for the future
of this fascinating tech.
Source: Yahoo
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