Yesterday 04:42 PM
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/...ar-travel/
KEY POINTS: With the successful Artemis II mission now complete, humanity has traveled farther from Earth than ever before: to beyond the far side of the Moon at its most distant, by thousands of kilometers. But if our goal is to eventually extend our reach not just to the other worlds of our Solar System, but to exoplanets around other stars, we’ll need a different, more efficient method of propulsion than chemical-based rockets can supply. The most efficient form of energy generation, theoretically, is to reach 100%, and only one fuel is capable of doing that: matter-antimatter annihilation. Here’s why that’s the ultimate dream, and how we might conceivably get there.
EXCERPT: Three main challenges arise in the endeavor to use antimatter as rocket fuel, all of which must be overcome if we actually want to have humans embark on an interstellar journey.
The creation of antimatter. We know how to do this one in laboratory settings, and although it does require much more energy to make the antimatter than we eventually release from its annihilation, that’s not really a problem. What is a problem is that we would have to make antimatter in large amounts. If you add up all the antimatter ever made in all the labs in the history of Earth, you end up with just about a microgram’s worth of antimatter. We’d need many millions of times more to power an interstellar journey.
The storage of antimatter. The very thing that makes antimatter such a fantastic fuel source — its propensity for annihilating with any normal matter that it contacts — makes it a liability for use as a fuel source. Somehow, we have to store this antimatter in a safe, stable way, and then transport it into a place where it undergoes a controlled annihilation with an equal-and-opposite amount of normal matter.
The usability of energy derived from matter-antimatter annihilation. Assuming we can overcome these first two problems, we then have to turn that energy of annihilation into useful thrust: ideally by shunting the post-annihilation particles in the opposite direction we want the spacecraft to accelerate.
Let’s look at these problems a little more in depth, one at a time... (MORE - details)
KEY POINTS: With the successful Artemis II mission now complete, humanity has traveled farther from Earth than ever before: to beyond the far side of the Moon at its most distant, by thousands of kilometers. But if our goal is to eventually extend our reach not just to the other worlds of our Solar System, but to exoplanets around other stars, we’ll need a different, more efficient method of propulsion than chemical-based rockets can supply. The most efficient form of energy generation, theoretically, is to reach 100%, and only one fuel is capable of doing that: matter-antimatter annihilation. Here’s why that’s the ultimate dream, and how we might conceivably get there.
EXCERPT: Three main challenges arise in the endeavor to use antimatter as rocket fuel, all of which must be overcome if we actually want to have humans embark on an interstellar journey.
The creation of antimatter. We know how to do this one in laboratory settings, and although it does require much more energy to make the antimatter than we eventually release from its annihilation, that’s not really a problem. What is a problem is that we would have to make antimatter in large amounts. If you add up all the antimatter ever made in all the labs in the history of Earth, you end up with just about a microgram’s worth of antimatter. We’d need many millions of times more to power an interstellar journey.
The storage of antimatter. The very thing that makes antimatter such a fantastic fuel source — its propensity for annihilating with any normal matter that it contacts — makes it a liability for use as a fuel source. Somehow, we have to store this antimatter in a safe, stable way, and then transport it into a place where it undergoes a controlled annihilation with an equal-and-opposite amount of normal matter.
The usability of energy derived from matter-antimatter annihilation. Assuming we can overcome these first two problems, we then have to turn that energy of annihilation into useful thrust: ideally by shunting the post-annihilation particles in the opposite direction we want the spacecraft to accelerate.
Let’s look at these problems a little more in depth, one at a time... (MORE - details)