Reactionless Thrust And a Possible Physics Anomaly - Printable Version +- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com) +-- Forum: Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-61.html) +--- Forum: Chemistry, Physics & Mathematics (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-77.html) +--- Thread: Reactionless Thrust And a Possible Physics Anomaly (/thread-3036.html)

Reactionless Thrust And a Possible Physics Anomaly - Yazata - Nov 20, 2016 Here's something peculiar that a friend tipped me off about: NASA researchers say that they injected microwaves into a closed assymmetrical cavity and obtained directional thrust. Not very much thrust, since all they got was about 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt (a newton is the force necessary to accelerate 1 kg at 1 meter/sec/sec), but they note that they might be able to increase this by optimizing the cavity or whatever. The interest in this is twofold: 1. Practically, used as an engine it wouldn't require that a spacecraft carry the reaction mass associated with fuel. All it requires is electricity which can conceivably be produced by solar panels or radioactive isotopes. One can imagine it being used to produce low-thrust but long-duration continuous impulse to power small interstellar space probes. 2. Theoretically, this thrust shouldn't be observed. If it doesn't have a mundane explanation, it might just be one of those little observational anomalies that leads to big theoretical developments in physics. The scientific community is apparently very skeptical, but it's a testable result that should be easy to reproduce and can be further investigated. Here's the published paper. Read the 'discussion' section where the authors speculate about how this could work without violating the conservation of momentum. It's interesting, if exceedingly speculative to my eye. But no doubt others will investigate it. http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/1.B36120 RE: Reactionless Thrust And a Possible Physics Anomaly - RainbowUnicorn - Nov 20, 2016 now we know what that thing is in the middle of Doctor Whos' Tardis             RE: Reactionless Thrust And a Possible Physics Anomaly - Syne - Nov 21, 2016 Too many of these "new science" discoveries turn out to fail at being replicable, so I'll just wait until it pans out. RE: Reactionless Thrust And a Possible Physics Anomaly - Magical Realist - Nov 23, 2016 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/nasa-impossible-emdrive-physics-peer-review-space-science/