Fullerine antimatter containment for rocket fuel

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-06-25 05:31:10

I saw this:
http://schlockmercenary.wikia.com/wiki/Antimatter

Antimatter is a form of mass that annihilates normal matter as well as itself if the two are ever brought into contact. Antimatter can be found in minute quantities in nature, such as the upper atmosphere of planets and certain kinds of radioactive decay, but it is destroyed by the surrounding matter almost instantly and therefor not usable for harvesting. With an annie-plant and the right technology, it can be created artificially. Due to the release of energy created by matter-antimatter annihilation, antimatter can be used as a fuel or an explosive, and in a few specialized applications this can even be done economically.
Antimatter is stored by encapsulating single antihelium atoms inside fullerene molecules. The resulting "fullerened antimatter" is a black powder which contains antimatter at the parts-per-thousand level and can be safely stored with no additional containment, although it should NOT be incinerated. Antimatter fueled much of the trouble on Credomar.
Antimatter is used to power breacher munitions and similar one-shot devices too small to include an annie-plant. Its use is frowned on in munitions that could use annie-plants instead, since the yield of an AM explosive cannot be controlled. Despite the name, neutronium-annihilation powerplants use gravy for fuel conversion, not antineutronium.

I suppose it would have to be an anti-helium ion, basically the nucleous of an antihelium atom, which would be missing two positrons, thus would have an elementary negative charge of 2, that negative charge would be repelled by the electrons in the orbital shells of the Fullerine molecule, thus it would be kept within the center of the atom and would not come in contact with matter. You do not want to incinerate the fullerene because that would destroy the antimatter containment and create a big explosion! Unless an explosion is what is desired. So you basically have a solid rocket fuel if you can get a chain reaction of exploding fullerene molecules with antihelium nuclei in side of them. So what kind of rocket fuel would this be?

Terraformer · 2014-06-25 07:59:39

One that should have an exhaust velocity on the order of ~6% of c, if you could get the anti-helium to annihilate with the carbon atoms. Low thrust, of course. Though perhaps one could use a very small amount as the fuel in a rocket, with something like water as the propellent...

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-06-25 15:59:00

One might trigger micro-hydrogen bombs with it, replace the plutonium which places a lower limit on the fusion bomb's yield, thus making it more useful for a spaceship not the size of a city. the hard part is making the antimatter. Bucky balls might be a more convenient storage mechanism. if you want a higher percentage yield, one could trap the antinucleius of a heavier element such as iron, or Uranium. 146 antineutrons and 92 antiprotons. Carbon has 6 protons and 6 neutrons, and a fullerene molecule has 60 carbon atoms for a total of 360 protons and 360 neutrons.

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2014-06-25 16:07:41)

Terraformer · 2014-06-26 05:53:39

Certainly, if you're trapping anti-neon, the energy is there for an exhaust velocity of ~0.15c. If you can combine that with a ramscoop (ram augmented rocket), then you could get exhaust velocities of 30%, 40% of c, perhaps...

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-26 08:39:46

How exactly is the antimatter prevented from reacting with the fullerenes?

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-06-27 10:42:42

JoshNH4H wrote:

How exactly is the antimatter prevented from reacting with the fullerenes?

Lets see, each carbon atom is surrounded by an electron shell, and the electrons in the electron shell are negatively charged, but so also is an antiproton. An antiproton would repel and be repelled by an electron, and since electrons surround the nuclei of atoms, any antiproton would have to first go through the electron shell of a neutral atom before it can make contact with a proton in the nucleus. Now lets say an antimatter atomic nucleus it inside a Buckminster fullerene molecule and completely surrounded by it. What is the anti-helium nucleus going to do?

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2014-06-27 10:46:24)

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-27 10:47:52

Eventually (we're talking minuscule fractions of a second, by the way), the wavefunction of the antinucleus is going to overlap with the wavefunction of one of the nuclei. That's just kind of the way it works. Now that I think about it, the wavefunctions will overlap all the time, and in a short period this will cause annihilation.

Nuclei don't behave like macroscopic objects. Did you know that if you have a particle with a kinetic energy of x, inside a potential well of depth 2x, the particle will still interact with a particle outside of the potential well?

Terraformer · 2014-06-27 11:51:19

That's true for everything. It's just that it happens so rarely that no-one is going to ever see it happen with their naked eyes any time before the heat death of the universe...

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-06-27 19:04:24

JoshNH4H wrote:

Eventually (we're talking minuscule fractions of a second, by the way), the wavefunction of the antinucleus is going to overlap with the wavefunction of one of the nuclei. That's just kind of the way it works. Now that I think about it, the wavefunctions will overlap all the time, and in a short period this will cause annihilation.
Nuclei don't behave like macroscopic objects. Did you know that if you have a particle with a kinetic energy of x, inside a potential well of depth 2x, the particle will still interact with a particle outside of the potential well?

Your basically talking about cold fusion here, if an antiproton can do it, so can a proton, the chance of proton-proton fusion through quantum tunneling is small. Proton-Antiproton fusion is 100 times as energetic, but I doubt it would happen very often, and one proton and one antiproton does not release a lot of energy, as the rest mass of both particles is small, I doubt it would set off a chain reaction.

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-27 19:46:13

Tom Kalbfus wrote:

Your [sic] basically talking about cold fusion here, if an antiproton can do it, so can a proton, the chance of proton-proton fusion through quantum tunneling is small. Proton-Antiproton fusion is 100 times as energetic, but I doubt it would happen very often, and one proton and one antiproton does not release a lot of energy, as the rest mass of both particles is small, I doubt it would set off a chain reaction.

I think you're missing the point... the barrier that two pro-Hydrogen* atoms have to tunnel through is not some fundamental opposition force between two particles, it's a coulomb barrier. In other words, the two positive charges repel each other so that you need to quantum tunnel through the barrier to have a reaction occur. This is not the case for antihydrogen and procarbon, which have the opposite charge.

You claim that the electron cloud ought to be suitably negatively charged to repel an antiproton, but this is not the case. The reason why this is not true is that from an electrostatic perspective the antiproton simply sees a fullerene, which is neither positively nor negatively charged. No doubt you've heard of molecules or ions contained within fullerenes; however, this containment works on a different principle, namely that, due to the Pauli exclusion principle, electrons cannot colocate. In effect, when you have pro-atoms forming pro-molecules things act like they "ought" to, considering them microscopically. The Pauli exclusion principle does not apply to antiprotons because it only applies to two particles of the same type.

Finally, regarding your claim that the annihilation of one antiproton is "not that much energy" I have to ask if you thought about that statement before you wrote it. The annihilation of one proproton with one antiproton releases the same amount of energy as the reaction of about 500,000,000 Carbon atoms with 500,000,000 Oxygen molecules to make CO2. This is not a macroscopic amount (I'd hoped it would be) but it is enough oxygen to make a cube about .0025 millimeters on a side, which is almost macroscopic. To reiterate, this is the energy released by one antiproton. It's a lot.

*Pro-particle: My non-standard term to specifically designate something that is not antimatter

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-06-28 17:19:10

500,000,000 oxygen molecules is not a lot of oxygen, if that was all you had to breathe, you would quickly suffocate. Yeah I figured something like that. I basically think that since an antiproton is a lot more massive that an electron, the larger particle would simply push the electrons aside as it heads for one of the protons in the atomic nucleolus, its hard for a proton to approach another proton because once they get past the electron shell, the two protons would repel, where a proton and antiproton would attract. Proton-antiproton fusion is very easy to achieve. I think nanotechnology is the way to go with antimatter containment.
http://angelsanddemons.web.cern.ch/faq/ … -contained

How is antimatter contained?
It is very difficult to contain antimatter. Any contact between a particle and its anti-particle leads to their immediate annihilation: their mass is converted into pure energy. To contain anti-particles, therefore, you have to isolate them from all particles.
Electrically charged anti-particles
It is possible to contain electrically charged antimatter particles such as antiprotons by using electromagnetic traps that confine the particles within a magnetic field so that they don't annihilate with other particles. These traps make it possible to contain up to about 10^12 anti-particles of the same charge.
However, particles of the same charge repel each other, so the more particles that are contained in a trap, the more energy is needed to power the magnetic field that contains them. It is not currently possible to store a significant quantity of antiprotons.
Electrically neutral anti-particles
For electrically neutral anti-particles or anti-atoms, the situation is even more difficult. It is impossible to use constant electric or magnetic fields to contain neutral antimatter, because these fields have no effect on the particles at all. Scientists are working on ideas to use ‘magnetic bottles’ (with inhomogeneous magnetic fields acting on the magnetic moment), or ‘optical traps’ (using lasers) but this is still under development.

10^12 antiparticles, well, what if we used nanotechnology to contain 10^12 antiparticles, instead of big macroscopic magnets and electric fields? I'm thinking would could have trillions of microscopic antimatter traps to contain 10^12 antiprotons each and use this as a rocket fuel Think we could make an antimatter containment device out of 10^12 carbon atoms? Avagodro's number is 6.02214129×10^23 so that many hydrogen atoms or protons makes a gram. That many carbon atoms makes 12 grams of carbon. So if there was an antimatter rap made with 10^12 carbon atoms, you could have 602,214,129,000 such traps, detonating such a trap would convert 1/6 of each trap's mass into energy, this would be a nanotech matter/antimatter fuel which might exist in the form of a powder. I think the concept has merit.

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-28 17:50:53

The idea that I like is to freeze anti-hydrogen solid and then use its diamagnetic properties to hold it in place. This is actually a pretty well-demonstrated technology, it's the same principle used to levitate frogs and such. No power consumption at all if you use superconductors, and when you want to use some of it you can zap it with a laser to ionize it and channel the ions towards your engine. That's actually more or less entirely within current technological ability. The issue with storing antimatter isn't so much the actual storage procedure so much as slowing the stuff down once it gets out of the particle accelerator.

Using nanotechnology to store antimatter isn't a "concept," it's a collection of buzzwords. A concept is like what you see above; Or, more realistically, that concept with actual numbers for the magnetic field requirements, amounts of antimatter, lasers, etc. Sure, it might be possible to store antimatter with nanotechnology, but I don't see why it would help things.

The biggest barrier to the use of antimatter is its low efficiency and the high cost of the particle accelerators needed to produce it. If we can scale these up and down respectively by several orders of magnitude, then we might be seeing antimatter rockets for Earth launch.

Having said that, it's an open question how an antimatter rocket would actually work. It produces gamma rays, after all, which aren't very useful from a propulsive standpoint.

What if you wanted an antimatter rocket with an Isp of 1000 s. How might that work?

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-06-29 04:18:53

An antimatter rocket would need tons of antimatter. The problem is how do you store those tons. If you zap a small part of the ice, how do you control where it goes. My thinking is each storage device is a matter/antimatter bomb, so we design tem so they are very stable until we are ready for them to lose antimatter containment and explode in the right place, therefore each one will have to be small and to explode in a place isolated from where the rest of the antimatter is stored.

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-29 09:36:06

Tons of antimatter? Each ton of antimatter will release 1.8e20 J upon reacting with an equal amount of matter. In comparison, the amount of H2/LOX fuel required to get 200 tonnes to orbit contains 3.5e13 J, seven orders of magnitude less. At 1000 s, it will take 6.5e13 J, (I assumed that the engine would be 40% efficient) so you would need .4 g of antimatter.

Solid hydrogen is diamagnetic, which means that it opposes all magnetic fields. But when you then take that hydrogen and zap it straight to a plasma it can be manipulated by magnetic fields. What you do is to contain the antihydrogen within a device that would funnel plasma towards a given point. The plasma will do what the magnetic field tells it to, the hydrogen will be suspended

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-06-30 09:08:01

I guess the problem is, if you take a block of antihydrogen ice and zap a tiny portion of it with a tiny laser, some of that heat energy will radiate outward through the block of ice, ionizing some of the antihydrogen, but the area surrounding the portion you ionize might just sublimate to a neutral anti-hydrogen gas, the gas is going to expand and come in contact with the walls of the antimatter containment device and create an explosion, where none is wanted. I'm thinking instead of one big block of antihydrogen ice how about a lot of little ones, each within its own expendable storage container with magnetic containment system and every thing. Now how much antihydrogen would be a useful amount to propel a spaceship at any one time. A metric ton consists of one million grams of antihydrogen, each gram would be composed of 1000 milligrams of antihydrogem, so the amount of energy released by annihilating 1 milligram of antihydrogen with 1 milligram of matter would be 1.8e+11 joules of energy instead of 1.8e+20 joules of energy by annihilating a ton at a time. So my proposal would be to make one billion small storage devices to magnetically contain 1 milligram blocks of antihydrogen ice, you remove each storage device with its bit of antihydrogen away from where the rest are stored, and you place it in the reaction chamber, and by remote control, you instruct that tiny storage device to turn off the magnetic field holding the little bit of antihydrogen in containment and what follows is a big explosion pushing the spaceship forward, you get another one of these and you repeat the previous procedure and you do it many times per second much like an Orion Spaceship, except using these tiny matter/antimatter bombs instead of fission or fusion bombs, this way we should be able to get a higher ISP than either the fission or fusion options.

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-30 20:27:17

An often overlooked fact about antimatter is that it releases its energy as gamma rays. To quote Wikipedia:

Wikipedia's wonderful editors wrote:

An explosion is a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner, usually with the generation of high temperatures and the release of gases. Supersonic explosions created by high explosives are known as detonations and travel via supersonic shock waves. Subsonic explosions are created by low explosives through a slower burning process known as deflagration.

Explosions as they are typically imagined are not really caused by energy, but by force and momentum. It is the nature of antimatter to annihilate everything. That is to say, there are no hot gases left to explode with. It's all gamma rays.

You ask, but what about the gamma rays themselves? Well, as you know, they are poorly absorbed by matter. But surely they generate some amount of force? Well, sure. Let's say that my 200 tonne craft payload craft, with its exhaust velocity of 10,000 m/s (Mass Ratio: 2.6) has a thrust-to-weight at liftoff of 2. This means that it will need to generate a force of 10 MN at liftoff. This necessitates 1000 kg/s of exhaust, and 125 GW of power. This equates to 7e-7 kg/s of antimatter. Assuming half of this is not recovered, 3.5e-7 kg/s (62.5 GW) will be wasted on antimatter explosions. It sounds like a lot, but how much force is it?

Well, only 200 N. That is to say, it's about the same amount of force as you generate from putting five gallons of milk on a shelf.

And it gets better. Sure, the energy deposited would be significant-- if it were actually deposited. The gamma rays generated by the interaction of matter and antimatter are uniquely penetrating. Depending on the choice of materials, it's entirely possible to design a ship that the gamma rays will barely interact with at all. Keep in mind, however, that this isn't necessarily a big deal. It's also possible to design a ship where the intercepted energy is used to heat up propellant before it gets to the engine, thus actually contributing to the thrust of the rocket.

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-07-01 06:22:44

Though antimatter bombs can be smaller than nuclear bombs, you can't make a thermonuclear bomb or a fission bomb that has the mass of one tenth of a gram, but you can make a matter/antimatter bomb on that scale. I think you would want the containment system to have a mass no greater than 100 times its antimatter content, otherwise one might as well use fusion. The point is to get a rocket whose efficiency is greater than fusion rockets, one wants to get to 20% of the speed of light at least and visit places like Gliese 832 c in a human lifetime, it would be nice if they would come up with some decent names for these planets by the way, that way they'd be easier to remember. Antimatter rockets are probably easier to achieve than direct matter to energy conversion, such as might be accomplished by mini-black holes for instance. I would say a ship similar to an Orion except substituting antimatter bombs for the nuclear ones might work. The pusher plates would have to be big enough to absorb about half the gamma rays of the matter/antimatter explosions, and of course to shield the crew and passengers from them. Put enough matter inbetween the explosions and the crew compartments an this will be accomplished. One simple design would be to have a nickel-iron asteroid, a few miles in diameter, and you explode the antimatter bombs on the opposite side of the asteroid from the passengers and the rest of the antimatter bombs in storage.

JoshNH4H · 2014-07-01 11:24:18

Sure, long term that's what antimatter rockets are going to be used for, but in the short term antimatter is just a superbattery. Either way, I still think that you're better off storing in bulk in the way that I mentioned, because it's easier to engineer one machine not to fail than trillions. I'd also expect that it gets easier and easier to confine antimatter the more of it you have, because you can rely on bulk properties instead of individual properties.

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-07-01 20:56:52

I think more like billions. I think the antimatter bombs should be kept dispersed, so the explosion of one won't affect the others. How much of an explosion would one milligram of antimatter produce if combined with one milligram of matter. antimatter is said to be about 100 times as energetic as a hydrogen bomb, so a one milligram antimatter bomb would produce the same energy as a hydrogen bomb that is about one tenth of a gram, if you could build one. So lets say a one megaton hydrogen bomb weighs a ton, that is one million grams so a tenth of a gram hydrogen bomb would have the explosive force of about 100 kg of TNT, quite a powerful explosion, about the equivalent of a car bomb in Iraq for instance, not the city leveling amount of force such as Hiroshima for example. I think a spaceship can be designed to withstand the explosive force of 100 kg of TNT, much of this would be in hard penetration gamma rays I am told so the ship might not feel the full force of this explosion were it to occur. I'd say storing this antimatter along the thin radiator fins of the spaceship would be a good idea.

Terraformer · 2014-07-02 06:52:22

The equation here is E=mc^2. c^2 is 9e16, so multiply your mass in kg by that to get the energy in joules.

A milligram is 1e-9kg, so the annihilation of that amount with matter would produce 1.8e8J - 180MJ. By comparison, 100kg of TNT would produce 90MJ (you forgot to double the mass of antimatter to get the mass that is annihilated). Enough, perhaps, to trigger proton-proton fusion, if concentrated sufficiently (though, the antimatter itself would draw the protons very close together, I think, due to it's negative charge).

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-07-02 09:35:06

Nevertheless, 180MJ is a sort of explosion that a spaceship could handle. and with bombs as tiny as 10 milligrams, a lot can be stored, that is a ratio of 10:1 of matter to antimatter, better than fusion, but less than an ideal 1:1 matter/antimatter annihilation. I think we may want the hot plasma the extra reaction mass provides. So 100 matter/antimatter bombs per gram, lets say an explosion of one matter/antimatter bomb per second for 180 kg of TNT equivalent, a kilogram would be 100,000 bombs, a ton would be 100 million bombs. You probably want at least 50% of the launch mass of the starship to be these matter antimatter bombs to achieve a significant fraction of the speed of light. So lets say the spaceship payload is 1000 tones and we have 1000 tons of matter/antimatter bombs to explode behind the pusher plate, and keeping in mind that we want to slow down as well. How fast do you think this one way starship could go? One thousand tons would be 100 billion matter/antimatter bombs by the way. At a rate of one bomb per second, it would take 3171 years to explode all those bombs. I'd say exploding 3171 bombs per second would reduce the total acceleration phase to 1 year accelerating and decelerating.

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-07-02 10:39:37

Space

Is Antimatter a Viable Starship Fuel?

Sep 28, 2012 03:43 AM ET // by Jennifer Ouellette

Hope springs eternal for die-hard Star Trek fans that scientists will one day build an actual, working antimatter propulsion engine similar to the one that powers the fictional starship Enterprise.

A paper published earlier this year by a pair of enterprising (get it?) physicists should fan the flames of that fantasy even further.

Ronan Keane (Western Reserve Academy) and Wei-Ming Zhang (Kent State University) report that the latest results from their computer simulations indicate that at least one key component of realizing a working antimatter propulsion engine — highly efficient magnetic nozzles — should be far more efficient than previously thought. And such nozzles are feasible using today’s technologies.

SLIDE SHOW: Introducing the Warpship

Before everyone chimes in with a resounding “Squee!”, let’s back up a moment.

First, its true: matter/antimatter propulsion is not just the stuff of science fiction. As he did with many technical aspects of the series, for the Enterprise propulsion system, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry drew on science fact.

Antimatter is the mirror image of ordinary matter. So antiparticles are identical in mass to their regular counterparts, but the electrical charges of antiparticles are reversed. An anti-electron would have a positive instead of a negative charge, while an antiproton would have a negative instead of a positive charge.

When antimatter meets matter, the result is an explosion. Both particles are annihilated in the process, and their combined masses are converted into pure energy — electromagnetic radiation that spreads outward at the speed of light.

Remember in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: when Kirk sabotages the Enterprise after surrendering his ship to the Klingons? He programs the computer to mix matter and antimatter indiscriminately. Ka-boom! The ship is destroyed.

Despite that whole annihilation thing, as recently as October 2000, NASA scientists were developing early designs for an antimatter engine for future missions to Mars.

ANALYSIS: Warp Drives: Making the ‘Impossible’ Possible

Antimatter is an ideal rocket fuel because all of the mass in matter/antimatter collisions is converted into energy. Matter/antimatter reactions produce 10 million times the energy produced by conventional chemical reactions such as the hydrogen and oxygen combustion used to fuel the space shuttle.

We’re talking reactions that are 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear fission produced at a nuclear power plant, or by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And they are 300 times more powerful than the energy released by nuclear fusion

Alas, the only way to produce antimatter is in large accelerators at places like CERN. Even the most powerful atom smashers only produce minute amounts of antiprotons each year — as little as a trillionth of a gram, which would barely light a 100-watt bulb for three seconds.

It would take tons of antimatter to fuel a trip to distant stars. It would take CERN roughly 1,000 years to produce one microgram of antimatter.

Should an ample supply of antimatter be found, a secure means of storage must then be devised; the antimatter must be kept separate from matter until the spacecraft needs more power. Mixing can’t occur all willy-nilly, because then the two would annihilate each other uncontrollably, with no means of harnessing the energy.

ANALYSIS: Metamaterials Could Help Simulate Warp Drive

But these are trivial engineering concerns, surely. The point is, Keane and Zhang think they’ve solved one part of the conundrum. Any rocket’s maximum speed depends on the configuration of the rocket stages, how much of the total mass is devoted to fuel, and a little something called exhaust velocity that provides the all-important thrust.

Keane and Zhang focus on the latter in their paper, i.e., how fast all those particles resulting from (hypothetical) matter-antimatter annihilation are traveling as they whip out of the rocket engine. Their premise relies on charged pions resulting from proton-antiproton collisions. A nozzle that emits a strong magnetic field could channel the emitted charged particles into a focused stream of charged pions, accelerating them to produce stronger thrust.

All this is old hat. And here’s the sticking point to that plan. The exhaust velocity of those pions depends partly on how fast they’re moving as they emerge from the annihilation event, and partly on the efficiency of the magnetic nozzle design.

Past calculations have shown that while the pions’ initial speed would be over 90 percent the speed of light, the magnetic nozzle would only be 36 percent efficient, so the largest escape velocity that could be achieved would be a disappointing one-third of light speed.

There isn’t much human beings can do to jack up the pions’ initial speed, so clearly the way to tackle this problem is to focus on the design of the magnetic nozzle. That’s exactly what Keane and Zhang did, relying on CERN software designed to simulate the complex interactions between particles, matters and fields so physicists can better understand the behavior of all those particles produced in collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

ANALYSIS: Interstellar Speed Menace For Warpships

The simulations showed that prior assessments of the magnetic nozzle’s efficiency were much too low; it should be possible to build a nozzle with 85 percent efficiency using technology available to us today.

True, they also found that the initial speed of the pions was lower than previously estimated — only about 80 percent of light speed. That still averages out to a far more promising final exhaust velocity of about 70 percent light speed.

There’s still the little problem of acquiring sufficient antimatter to fuel an entire rocket, even if we could work out all the engineering kinks. Keane and Zhang hypothesize that rather than creating antimatter on board, as the Enterprise does, it might be more feasible to mine deposits of antimatter in space.

Last year the PAMELA mission found that Earth is ringed by antiprotons. Unfortunately, it only detected 28 protons over the course of its two-year mission. That’s less than CERN produces each day.

Okay, so maybe we’re not ready for antimatter powered spaceships just yet. But it’s fun to play around with these kinds of ideas. Perhaps one day, one of these crazy schemes will pay off, and a future generation of astronauts will boldly go where only the fictional Enterprise has dared to venture before.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on May 16, 2012.

Images: (top) Proposed schematic of an antimatter propulsion engine, NASA. (bottom) The fictional U.S.S. Enterprise.

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#1 2014-06-25 05:31:10

Fullerine antimatter containment for rocket fuel

#2 2014-06-25 07:59:39

Re: Fullerine antimatter containment for rocket fuel

#3 2014-06-25 15:59:00

Re: Fullerine antimatter containment for rocket fuel

#4 2014-06-26 05:53:39

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#5 2014-06-26 08:39:46

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#6 2014-06-27 10:42:42

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#7 2014-06-27 10:47:52

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#8 2014-06-27 11:51:19

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#9 2014-06-27 19:04:24

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#10 2014-06-27 19:46:13

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#11 2014-06-28 17:19:10

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#12 2014-06-28 17:50:53

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#13 2014-06-29 04:18:53

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#14 2014-06-29 09:36:06

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#15 2014-06-30 09:08:01

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#17 2014-07-01 06:22:44

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