You are not logged in.
I found this piece of news today.
Magnetoshell doesn’t deflect gas like an aeroshell or plasma like a magnetic decelerator. It captures the hypersonic neutral gas through collisional processes. The momentum of the charge-exchanged gas is absorbed by the magnetic structure.
Considering that there are some potential problems with decelerating something with the mass needed to sustain human life on Mars, this could be a needed breakthrough.
SWAT Kats fanatic
Offline
From the article it is claimed..
Mars Scaling
• Martian deceleration is excellent
• At 120 km
• Drag force of 1 kN
• Effective drag radius of 15 meters with 1 meter antenna
Now a drag force of 1KN at 120Km altitude with an effective drag radius of 15 metres doesn't feel right to me.
From one of the comments in the same article, at that altitude the Martian atmosphere is 1.28e-8 Kg/m3
If you're travelling at (say) 6Km/s at that point a circle of 17x2=34m diameter traverses 8 grams of atmosphere per second.
Even if all that mass were immediately changed in velocity by 6Km/s that's a force of 49 Newtons.
Not insignificant, but about what I'd expect from a really really big parachute.
If its useful it has to require minimal power (meaning minimal mass power source) and has to outperform equivalent sources of drag such as simply trailing a heat resistant ballute.
Still.. interesting.
Offline
Much more information available here
Interesting concept, but you raise cogent points. There's no way it's acting as a mirror, right, reflecting particles several times faster than they impact?
-Josh
Offline