Epsilon Eridani has always intrigued me because in astronomical terms, it’s not all that far from the Sun. I can remember as a kid noting which stars were closest to us – the Centauri trio, Tau Ceti and Barnard’s Star – wondering which of these would be the first to be visited by a probe from Earth. Later, I thought we would have quick confirmation of planets around Epsilon Eridani, since it’s a scant (!) 10.5 light years out, but despite decades of radial velocity data, astronomers have only found one gas giant, and even that confirmation was slowed by noise-filled datasets.
Even so, Epsilon Eridani b is confirmed. Also known as Ægir (named for a figure in Old Norse mythology), it’s in a 3.5 AU orbit, circling the star every 7.4 years, with a mass somewhere between 0.6 and 1.5 times that of Jupiter. But there is more: We also get two asteroid belts in this system, as Gerald Jackson points out in his new paper on using antimatter for deceleration into nearby star systems, as well as another planet candidate.
Image: This artist’s conception shows what is known about the planetary system at Epsilon Eridani. Observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope show that the system hosts two asteroid belts, in addition to previously identified candidate planets and an outer comet ring. Epsilon Eridani is located about 10 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus. It is visible in the night skies with the naked eye. The system’s inner asteroid belt appears as the yellowish ring around the star, while the outer asteroid belt is in the foreground. The outermost comet ring is too far out to be seen in this view, but comets originating from it are shown in the upper right corner. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC).
This is a young system, estimated at less than one billion years. For both Epsilon Eridani and Proxima Centauri, deceleration is crucial for entering the planetary system and establishing orbit around a planet. The amount of antimatter available will determine our deceleration options. Assuming a separate method of reaching Proxima Centauri in 97 years (perhaps beamed propulsion getting the payload up to 0.05c), we need 120 grams of antiproton mass to brake into the system. A 250 year mission to Epsilon Eridani at this velocity would require the same 120 grams.
Thus we consider the twin poles of difficulty when it comes to antimatter, the first being how to produce enough of it (current production levels are measured in nanograms per year), the second how to store it. Jackson, who has long championed the feasibility of upping our antimatter production, thinks we need to reach 20 grams per year before we can start thinking seriously about flying one of these missions. But as both he and Bob Forward have pointed out, there are reasons why we produce so little now, and reasons for optimism about moving to a dedicated production scenario.
Past antiproton production was constrained by the need to produce antiproton beams for high energy physics experiments, requiring strict longitudinal and transverse beam characteristics. Their solution was to target a 120 GeV proton beam into a nickel target [41] followed by a complex lithium lens [42]. The world record for the production of antimatter is held by the Fermilab. Antiproton production started in 1986 and ended in 2011, achieving an average production rate of approximately 2 ng/year [43]. The record instantaneous production rate was 3.6 ng/year [44]. In all, Fermilab produced and stored 17 ng of antiprotons, over 90% of the total planetary production.
Those are sobering numbers. Can we cast antimatter production in a different light? Jackson suggests using our accelerators in a novel way, colliding two proton beams in an asymmetric collider scenario, in which one beam is given more energy than the other. The result will be a coherent antiproton beam that, moving downstream in the collider, is subject to further manipulation. This colliding beam architecture makes for a less expensive accelerator infrastructure and sharply reduces the costs of operation.
The theoretical costs for producing 20 grams of antimatter per year are calculated under the assumption that the antimatter production facility is powered by a square solar array 7 km x 7 km in size that would be sufficient to supply all of the needed 7.6 GW of facility power. Using present-day costs for solar panels, the capital cost for this power plant comes in at $8 billion (i.e., the cost of 2 SLS rocket launches). $80 million per year covers operation and maintenance. Here’s Jackson on the cost:
…3.3% of the proton-proton collisions yields a useable antiproton, a number based on detailed particle physics calculations [45]. This means that all of the kinetic energy invested in 66 protons goes into each antiproton. As a result, the 20 g/yr facility would theoretically consume 6.7 GW of electrical power (assuming 100% conversion efficiencies). Operating 24/7 this power level corresponds to an energy usage of 67 billion kW-hrs per year. At a cost of $0.01 per kW-hr the annual operating cost of the facility would be $670 million. Note that a single Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier costs $13 billion! The cost of the Apollo program adjusted for 2020 dollars was $194 billion.
Science Along the Way
Launching missions that take decades, and in some cases centuries, to reach their destination calls for good science return wherever possible, and Jackson argues that an interstellar mission will determine a great deal about its target star just by aiming for it. Whereas past missions like New Horizons could count on the position of targets like Pluto and Arrokoth being programmed into the spacecraft computers, the preliminary positioning information uploaded to the craft came from Earth observation. Our interstellar craft will need more advanced tools. It will have to be capable of making its own astrometrical observations, sending its calculations to the propulsion system for deceleration into the target system and orbital insertion, thus refining exoplanet parameters on the fly.
Remember that what we are considering is a hybrid mission, using one form of propulsion to attain interstellar cruise velocity, and antimatter as the method for deceleration. You might recall, for example, the starship ISV Venture Star in the film Avatar, which uses both antimatter engines and a photon sail. What Jackson has added to the mix is a deep dive into the possibilities of antimatter for turning what would have been a flyby mission into a long-lasting planet orbiter.
Let’s consider what happens along the line of flight as a spacecraft designed with these methods makes its way out of the Solar System. If we take a velocity of 0.02c, our spacecraft passes the outgoing Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft in two years, and within three more years it passes into the gravitational lensing regions of the Sun beginning at 550 AU. A mere five years has taken the vehicle through the Kuiper Belt and moved it out toward the inner Oort Cloud, where little is currently known about such things as the actual density distribution of Oort objects as a function of radius from the Sun. We can also expect to gain data on any comparable cometary clouds around Proxima Centauri or Epsilon Eridani as the spacecraft continues its journey.
By Jackson’s calculations, when we’re into the seventh year of such a mission, we are encountering Oort Cloud objects at a pretty good clip, with an estimated 450 Oort objects within 0.1 AU of its trajectory based on current assumptions. Moving at 1 AU every 5.6 hours, we can extrapolate an encounter rate of one object per month over a period of three decades as the craft transits this region. Jackson also notes that data on the interstellar medium, including the Local Interstellar Cloud, will be prolific, including particle spectra, galactic cosmic ray spectra, dust density distributions, and interstellar magnetic field strength and direction.
Image: This is Figure 7 from the paper. Caption: Potential early science return milestones for a spacecraft undergoing a 10-year acceleration burn with a cruise velocity of 0.02c. Credit: Gerald Jackson.
It’s interesting to compare science return over time with what we’ve achieved with the Voyager missions. Voyager 2 reached Jupiter about two years after launch in 1977, and passed Saturn in four. It would take twice that time to reach Uranus (8.4 years into the mission), while Neptune was reached after 12. Voyager 2 entered the heliopause after 41.2 years of flight, and as we all know, both Voyagers are still returning data. For purposes of comparison, the Voyager 2 mission cost $865 million in 1973 dollars.
Thus, while funding missions demands early return on investment, there should be abundant opportunity for science in the decades of interstellar flight between the Sun and Proxima Centauri, with surprises along the way, just as the Voyagers occasionally throw us a curveball – consider the twists and wrinkles detected in the Sun’s magnetic field as lines of magnetic force criss-cross, and reconnect, producing a kind of ‘foam’ of magnetic bubbles, all this detected over a decade ago in Voyager data. The long-term return on investment is considerable, as it includes years of up-close exoplanet data, with orbital operations around, for example, Proxima Centauri b.
It will be interesting to see Jackson’s final NIAC report, which he tells me will be complete within a week or so. As to the future, a glimpse at one aspect of it is available in the current paper, which refers to what the original NIAC project description referred to as “a powerful LIDAR system…to illuminate, identify and track flyby candidates” in the Oort Cloud. But as the paper notes, this now seems impractical:
One preliminary conclusion is that active interrogation methods for locating 10 km diameter objects, for example with the communication laser, are not feasible even with megawatts of available electrical power.
We’ll also find out in the NIAC report whether or not Jackson’s idea of using gram-scale chipcraft for closer examination of, say, objects in the Oort has stood up to scrutiny in the subsequent work. This hybrid mission concept using antimatter is rapidly evolving, and what lies ahead, he tells me in a recent email, is a series of papers expanding on antimatter production and storage, and further examining both the electrostatic trap and electrostatic nozzle. As both drastically increasing antimatter production, as well as learning how to maximize small amounts, are critical for our hopes to someday create antimatter propulsion, I’ll be tracking this report closely.
It should be noted that this realistic solar PV Levelized cost forecast well before 2050 would make solar PV the cheapest form of electrical energy generation. If we can make anti-protons (and anti-hydrogen, anti-lithium) then we surely can make high specific energy synthetic fuels as well as extract CO2 from the air. And should we decide not to use the power to make anti-matter as there is no mention of the devastation of a containment failure at the manufacturing site, we can use it for other purposes. Only the manufacturing plant is a dedicated facility. I would love to see the Environmental Impact Report for such a facility.
What might be worth looking into is taking the manufacture off-planet depending on launch costs. One advantage of siting the facility in space, perhaps beneath the lunar surface, is that the needed vacuum is free, and therefore the structure mass would mostly be the magnets to accelerate the protons. Remote operation of such a facility would ensure that any accidents would not impact the local biosphere including people. It would also avoid any possible Earth launched accidents.
Anti-matter is about 2 orders of magnitude more energy dense than deuterium. A thermonuclear bomb yields about 50 kt/kg. So a 100g of antimatter would result in a 0.5 mt explosion, or about 1/2 the size of the fertilizer storage silo explosion in Beirut. Keeping the anti-matter deep underground might be a sensible precaution. Similar precautions apply to off-planet manufacture, possibly even more so, as we don’t want facility fragments blasted through the orbits of our satellites and any space stations. So a facility on the lunar farside might be a good location, allowing experiments to be done.
“The theoretical costs for producing 20 grams of antimatter per year are calculated under the assumption that the antimatter production facility is powered by a square solar array 7 km x 7 km in size that would be sufficient to supply all of the needed 7.6 GW of facility power.”
7.6GW/49*10^6m2 = 155 w/m2.
That’s a reasonable output for a square meter of solar panel in direct sunlight, but I have to point out that the solar panel, unless in orbit, will NOT be in direct sunlight most of the day. I’d estimate that to *average* 7.6GW over the whole 24 hours, you’d actually need 4-5 times that area, and that’s assuming tracking panels. (Which would require more square meters of ground area per meter of panel, too!) Fixed panels would perform worse.
You need to factor in storage, or paying for conventional power generation most of the day, or running the accelerator at a poor duty cycle.
These sort of considerations are why SPS are an attractive idea, after all.
So, I have to ask: What fraction of of the antimatter cost is the cost of the accelerator? Would it be feasible to just run it at a poor duty cycle?
Hello Brett.
Yes I could not get the math for the power production to figure for a 7km square solar array either.
And arrived at the conclusion that 5 times that area would be needed. The sun does not shine around the clock, unless you’re in the arctic. But the solar power generated is then lower, and that’s the case each morning and evening as well.
Now lets remember that nanogram = 10 power -9, while the suggested production here is 20 grams. It’s massive difference in scale. I’m not saying it’s undoable. But when reading the main text I rather envisioned an accelerator wrapped around the Moon and several large areas plastered with solar cells.
Oh, the accelerator would hardly have to be “wrapped around the Moon”, we’re not trying for the Higgs particle here, just ordinary anti-protons. The energy level isn’t that high, it’s a question of beam current and efficiency.
I see this solar panel stuff all the time, like Musk building a solar farm at Boca Chica, and talking about manufacturing methane from CO2 in the air.
Well, there he at least has the excuse of needing practice for Mars.
I think it’s an attempt by people proposing large high-tech ventures to buy off the Greens with impractical ‘renewable’ hand waving. Like a bunch of Luddites will leave your project alone if you propose powering it with unicorn farts. Hardly!
Solar is not economically sensible for something power hungry you mean to run 24/7. Not on Earth. It would make more sense to put the accelerator and solar panels in orbit; If SpaceX’s “Starship” works out, SPS would probably be economically feasible, and using the power in orbit would be a two-fer, avoiding transmission losses and having ready access to vacuum.
Unmentioned are the arms control implications. Once you’re manufacturing antimatter in gram quantities, extremely tiny, smuggle-able nuclear bombs become feasible. You could literally build a kiloton antimatter bomb into a cell phone. And hydrogen bombs of any size without fissionable material. (Hey, maybe Orion from Earth’s surface would be feasible, using AM triggered P-B11 bombs!)
The attempt to do this is going to, unavoidably, involve arms control considerations, just like Project Starshot’s huge laser array.
If a storage depot containing antimatter explodes, won’t the initial blast keep most of the substance from touching matter, and thus keep it from annihilating all at once? What I see is something like a pretty potent ‘fizzle’, ‘burning’ its way out of any containment and into the atmosphere, then working its way to the top of it, where it will, somehow, ‘fizzle out’?
How in the world would an explosion prevent AM from touching other matter. That unless you could construct an explosion not from pressure, but with vacuum! Jokes aside, there’s no reason any antimatter would get in a hurry to get to the top of the atmosphere. It will annihilate long before that, and very locally to where it have been released, breached or containment failure occurred. With the insanity of the general population I can already envision a crowd of protesters outside the gate, yelling that the production of antimatter is the devils work, as it’s the opposite of their gods creation. (Joke again.)
“How in the world would an explosion prevent AM from touching other matter. ”
an explosion of AM (on the Moon) would escape into the vacuum
The quantity of anti-matter required is quite a lot more than shown here. A larger amount will be needed during R & D of the engine, testing, refinement and “tank” testing. The design and operation currently depends on substantial speculation of the engine design and operation, and safety protocols.
Manufacture in orbit or on the Moon is probably a must from a safety standpoint, if more than a few grams are going to be accumulated.
Haven’t I read that a thermal rocket using a very tiny amount of antimatter to heat hydrogen would have good economics for launching from Earth, even at extremely high anti-matter costs?
Building an antimatter production facility on the Moon would limit the possible damages of a “containment breach”. But if we’re using anti-matter to slow down, why not use it to accelerate as well??
IVO Quantum Drive.
IVO Ltd Introduces The World’s First Pure Electric Thruster For Satellites.
ATELLITE 2022 – Washington, D.C. – Mar. 24, 2022 – IVO Ltd., the pioneer of capacitive based technologies, today unveiled the IVO Quantum Drive, the first pure electric thruster for satellites that uses zero fuel and brings unmatched efficiency, scalability and capability to the space industry. Built upon the basis of quantized inertia, the IVO Quantum Drive is the world’s first commercially viable and available pure electric propulsion technology to achieve legitimacy via thermal vacuum testing.
IVO Ltd. worked with E-Labs of Fredericksburg, VA to validate the thruster under the rigorous conditions it will see in space. The vacuum chamber also served to validate thrust being developed by quantized inertia. The IVO Quantum Drive achieved 45mN of thrust consuming only a single watt and zero fuel. This was done at 9×10-6 Torr with temperature cycles ranging from -100c to 100c. The thruster performed as expected with no variation in performance.
“The benefits of pure electric thrust technology will be felt across the space industry as a whole. The IVO Quantum Drive makes it possible to measure a spacecraft’s lifespan in decades instead of a few years,” said Daniel Telehey, Chief Operating Officer of IVO Ltd.
“We are particularly excited about the mission capability this technology enables with the drastic reduction in energy requirements,” Telehey added. “Ultimately the modularity of the IVO Quantum Drive makes it possible to develop far superior spacecraft that are incredibly efficient, lightweight, maneuverable, fuel independant and most importantly cost effective.”
Space Propulsion Breakthrough:
In 2021, CEO and Inventor of the IVO Quantum Drive, Richard Mansell, discovered pure electric thrust is viable for spacecraft through a combination of mathematics and empirical test data.
“Quantum Inertia has been discussed as a theory for several years, so we approached the problem with a non-theoretical lens,” commented Mansell. “We can now say that the basic principles of Quantum Inertia hold true in test data, and they still align with quantum, inertial and gravitational physics. “
Due to its use of electricity only and zero fuel, the IVO Quantum Drive has zero emissions and is self contained. This allows it the unique ability to be internal to the spacecraft itself. The IVO Quantum Drive’s modular design allows it to scale on multiple axes to meet the needs of each individual spacecraft regardless of thrust requirements.
“The dramatic reduction in energy demand of this thruster will result in the downsizing of solar requirements of a spacecraft. This will allow a smaller form factor as well as weight reduction which will increase the number of spacecraft on a given launch vehicle. Craft development is already very expensive so the ability to save on both the development cost as well as launch cost will serve the space industry well,” added Paul Cejas, Technology Integration Manager, IVO Ltd.
IVO Ltd. is set to begin development programs for customers starting Q2 2022.
https://ivolimited.us/press-release-ivo-ltd-introduces-the-worlds-first-pure-electric-thruster-for-satellites/
A Thrust from ‘Nothing’.
Tuesday, 2 November 2021
In a small lab in Plymouth, a new quantum thruster is taking shape. I have been theorising about getting thrust from quantised inertia and trying to work out how best to do it for DARPA (see ref 1). With Prof Perez-Diaz we managed to get a few microNewtons out, and I had considered asymmetric plates, but engineer Frank Becker read my papers, remembered a capacitor-based Biefeld-Brown-type experiment he had done, and with a few discussion with me, he and Ankur Bhatt tried it and produced milliNewtons of thrust (see ref 2). This test made my year. Even DARPA emailed me saying something like “What the heck is this!?”. One problem was that they had used a high voltage with a digital balance so there was a potential for glitches. Then Richard Mansell of IVO Ltd tried it with an analogue method and agreed with them. This new Mansell group has also blazed the path in innovation as well.
In its simplest form, anyone, with a little care for safety, can try this experiment. If you have a humble desk and a power socket then the cost is £800. I know because I’ve just spent that much on it! Not bad for a technology that promises to revolutionise just about every industry we have: satellites, rockets, cars, energy…etc. The trick is to ensure no artefacts, and that we hope to do at Plymouth.
The method is to setup a potential difference of 5kV between the plates of a capacitor, and separate them by about 10 micron with a dielectric. You then allow electrons to quantum tunnel across the gap at a very low current (1 microAmp) but at a massive acceleration. The theory of quantised inertia says that they will see a field of nice hot Unruh radiation everywhere, except between the capacitor plates, as for the old Casimir effect. There will be then a quantum void between the plates that will pull the electrons out of the cathode faster than expected and this will add momentum to the system which will thrust towards the anode. A thrust from ‘nothing’. As you can see in the theory paper below (ref 3), QI predicts the results of Becker and Bhatt and Mansell exactly, even the changes as you vary the plate separation.
I’m glad that my openness about QI theory and its possible applications, partly in this blog, encouraged talented engineers to contribute because in my opinion they have shaved years off the path to QI application. This includes the above-mentioned folk, but also many on twitter and many who made comments here. My question is, what is my role now? Of course, I will continue to develop the QI theory, and I have two novels describing it written, and a second text book in the works, but my DARPA funding ends at the end of 2022. I hope to give DARPA a quantum thrust of 10 mN by then. What then?
What I’d like to do is to maintain freedom to continue to develop QI, to write about it, to not starve (!) and not have to be too distracted with business! One possibility would be to setup a Horizon Institute (HÎ)? Perhaps more like a Federation of Labs. The idea would be to use crowd funding or Venture Capital funding to provide support to labs developing QI thrusters, space & interstellar tests and new energy sources based on it, provide advice based on QI, and also a testing facility. In the present era it might be best outside academia? There are already two university labs (In California and Texas) crying out at me for money to start their experiments. As usual, I can see the horizon but not the detailed path to get there! Please make comments below – you might get us to Proxima Centauri quicker!
References
McCulloch, M.E., 2018. Propellant-less propulsion from quantised inertia. J Space Explo, Volume: 7(3). https://www.tsijournals.com/articles/propellantless-propulsion-from-quantized-inertia-13923.html
Becker, F. and A., Bhatt, 2018. Electrostatic accelerated electrons within symmetric capacitors during field emission condition events exert bidirectional propellant-less thrust. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04368
McCulloch, M.E., 2020. Thrust from symmetric capacitors using quantised inertia. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353481953_Thrust_from_Symmetric_Capacitors_using_Quantised_Inertia (Submitted to JPC).
https://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/2021/11/a-thrust-from-nothing.html
The claimed performance is 1000x more efficient than various ion drives that do expel propellant, rather than being reactionless. [Satellites in Earth orbit could use electromagnetic forces by interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field to move – ie standard physics.]
McCulloch’s Quantized Inertia theory appears to be rather fringe science. I see explanations, but no peer-reviewed papers.
His JSE paper: “Propellant-less Propulsion from Quantized Inertia.” starts off assuming the EM drive works, which is not accepted AFAIK, which makes this paper somewhat suspect IMO. His TEDx talk that suggests that dark matter is wrong based on the correlation of galaxy illuminance and stellar acceleration as a function of the position in the galactic radius uses data I have never seen before and might even be fabricated. But I leave it to physics experts to try to explain QI and if it is real or not.
“Quantum Inertia” – a lot of hooey if u ask me
Antimatter storage would have to involve constraint by force fields since any matter would in effect be explosive. It is hard to imagine a force field that is 100% “antimatter-tight”; the issue becomes how much of a leakage in transit over the better part of a century or more, and will the matter structures stand up to such an assault?
The storage method is cryogenic hydrogen pellets encapsulated in anti-lithium to reduce vapor pressure, and suspended electrostatically. IMO, synthesis of the anti-lithium is actually the most questionable step in this proposal. But as noted, it could be proven out with normal matter, first.
If the anti-lithium synthesis doesn’t work out, you could probably use laser cooling methods to capture the evaporating anti-hydrogen and redeposit it on the pellet. Or perhaps just plan on using the anti-hydrogen as it evaporates.
There was something about hybrid matter/antimatter at phys.org…liquid helium was involved.
A “pure” anti-proton bean…absolutely pure as Decker called it ?
I thought that you might be interested in this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14675
45mN of thrust using 1 W.
1 W = 1 Nm/s
Watts are units of power. Newtons are units of force.
Don’t we have some unit conversion issues here?
The problem is Specific Impulse (Isp) because there is no mass being ejected. I do have a compaision in the NASA NEXT-C ion engine which gives “NEXT can produce 6.9 kW thruster power and 236 mN thrust”.
https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/space/sep/gridded-ion-thrusters-next-c/
1000 mN = 1 Newton (N) but 6900 watts times .045 mN equals 310 Newtons which is a heck of a lot more thrust then the NEXT-C can produce. So please check my figures with someone that has worked with this because I find it hard to believe!
Mike McCulloch has been working with DARPA, which to means to me there is something to his research.
DARPA Is Researching Quantized Inertia, a Theory Many Think Is Pseudoscience.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x3ed9/darpa-is-researching-quantized-inertia-a-theory-of-physics-many-think-is-pseudoscience
There is growing evidence that the Casmir effect has many intertesting effects so something may be coming out soon.
Casimir effect in space-times of rotating wormholes.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-021-09000-3
I saw an interesting news article recently about antimatter in liquid helium. ( https://phys.org/news/2022-03-behavior-hybrid-antimatter-atoms-superfluid.html ) Apparently, an antiproton and an electron can orbit a helium nucleus. The electron fends off other nuclei while the antiproton can orbit at a quantum number of 30 or so. How long this can last, I have no idea. But to my uninformed mind, it seems like such a substance, kept cold enough, might not suffer collisions at all, while the antiproton might still be maintained in high orbit by absorbing a few precise frequencies. Is that conceivable or am I just letting my imagination get away from me?
Hi Paul
Gerald Jackson & Steven Howe have made an interesting suggestion for storing antimatter – create sufficient amounts of anti-lithium to coat balls of frozen anti-hydrogen, so they can then be indefinitely levitated magnetically. Apparently a microns-thin coating is enough to suppress the vapour pressure at the storage temperatures desired.
There’s a NETS2021 presentation online here: Antimatter-Based Propulsion for Exoplanet Exploration
They’ve studied the concept for the last few years and there seem to be no show-stoppers. Just to throw this out there, but I believe antimatter production would be an ideal process to park in outer space, with dedicated Solar Power Satellites for energy. I wonder just how small the particle accelerators can get, given the advances in laser plasma wave-field accelerators?
The storage facility will need to be shielded, primarily from GCRs, to prevent potential accidents. Perhaps keep the facility in a captured asteroid for shielding, and in a place where any catastrophic accident doesn’t allow “shrapnel” to cross our various earth-centric orbits, e.g. at L2.
Humans typically expand any operation, so the 20gm/year would no doubt increase to allow for greater production and use. Anti-matter would be a very high-energy material for spacecraft propulsion, and any economic advantage would drive increased production, making the facility ever more dangerous in the case of an accident.
“The storage facility will need to be shielded, primarily from GCRs, to prevent potential accidents.”
Didn’t their analysis demonstrate that this wasn’t actually an issue?
By the way, there’s no reason you need to store the antimatter in the same place that it’s manufactured, beyond a small amount in process. In fact, you should avoid that, because the production facility will be expensive, you don’t want to have to replace it if there’s a storage accident. I expect it would be stored as individual containments, spaced far enough apart that one failing would not cause a chain reaction.
I must have missed that. Can you indicate where you read/saw this?
Location storage anti-matter. I admit to some terrestrial bias here. Factories that make hazardous materials still tend to store the material onsite. Think explosives, fertilizer, and refineries. That issue could be rather different in space. Moving anti-matter might be like moving nitro-glycerin – it has to be done very carefully. [Movies have be made that contain this plot.] Moving anti-matter might result in destroying a spacecraft on its way to a storage location, and we are back to that issue. Moving it underground might be a better idea, such as by rail in a lunar lava tube. If the risk is during manufacture rather than storage, then why store it elsewhere?
IDK the answers to these questions, but I suspect that just as with terrestrial production of hazardous materials, onsite storage improves security and reduces the risk of theft.
Like uncontrolled nuclear reactor meltdowns, there is no obviously safe way to prevent a major accident if the anti-matter container fails for any reason. Storage and use require a failure-free operation. Use by a robotic ship fior propulsion is OK, but maybe not for for humans.
At 6 minutes, 55 seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMPnDW9yW4Y
“Use by a robotic ship fior propulsion is OK, but maybe not for for humans.”
I’ve mused about the possibility of having manned ships propelled by antimatter accompanied by automated fuel tenders, which would supply the manned ship with its antimatter in the form of particle beams. But given the downsides of being stranded in an unfueled ship at, say, 0.2 C, you’d have to have enough such fuel drones around to be able to spare at least one, or you might as well just carry the fuel onboard.
For in-system travel, where the propellant mass vastly exceeds the antimatter mass, the antimatter should be onboard, and the particle beam should be the propellant.
I’m not sure where I read about the various fractions of antimatter to mass depending on the mission, possibly an article by Greg Benford a long time ago. All I reall was that a flight to a Sol plant was around 80:1 propellant to AM, whilst an interstellar flight was 1:1. For a ship that must do both modes, collecting the propellant within the system by whatever means makes most sense.
Correction. It was Robert Forward, in his book Future Magic (1988), chapter on Magic Matter.
The ratios were off, but are indicated for missions to the Moon, Pluto, and an interstellar mission at 0.1c. He argues that we can do this, rather than if.
Production of antimatter at 1gm/day using a 10 TW collector of 10,000 km^2. Forward always did think big.
I see the anti-proton beam ‘liberating’ the antimatter in the helium…a two-fer?
Use any boost to go farther afield.
——47 Ursae Majoris say.
That star system speaks to me somehow….
One problem, interstellar space is full of neutrons, protons and gamma rays flying around all over the place. Antiparticles are made in special sheilded facilitys but maybe there is a beter way to keep it stored like magnetic fields??? I keep thinking about the real geniuses that used Lithium 7 on Operation Castle’s, code-name Bravo, H Bomb…
Lithium-7 actually responds better to neutron bombardment than lithium-6. The resulting explosion yielded 15 megatons, the largest atmospheric detonation in American history.
Thanks to lithium-7’s unexpected “tritium bonus,” the Shrimp’s blast equaled the entire destructive power of all the bombs the Allies dropped in World War II.
The Lithium Blues—Or How America Triggered an Out-of-Control Nuke.
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-lithium-blues-or-how-america-triggered-an-out-of-control-nuke-b4ea845b5d8a
But whats to worry about after so many years in interstellar space… ;-}
HB11 Energy demonstrates nuclear fusion using a laser.
Sydney, Australia (SPX) Mar 29, 2022
https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/HB11_Energy_demonstrates_nuclear_fusion_using_a_laser_999.html
HB11 Energy.
https://hb11.energy/
https://hb11.energy/how-it-works/
Advanced Fusion Reactors for Space Propulsion and Power Systems .
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20110014263/downloads/20110014263.pdf
“However aneutronic fusion propulsion plants for Space deployment will ultimately offer the possibility of enhanced performance from
nuclear gain as compared to existing ionic engines as well as providing a clean solution to Planetary Protection considerations and requirements. Proton triggered 11Boron fuel (p- 11B) will
produce abundant ion kinetic energy for In-Space vectored thrust. Thus energetic alpha particles “exhaust “ momentum can be used directly to produce high ISP thrust and also offer possibility of power conversion into electricity. p- 11B is an advanced fusion plant fuel with well understood reaction kinematics but will require some new conceptual thinking as to the most effective implementation.
World-first: HB11 Energy demonstrates nuclear fusion using a laser.
March 29, 2022
Australia’s first fusion energy company HB11 Energy has demonstrated a world-first ‘material’ number of fusion reactions by a private company, producing ten times more fusion reactions than expected based on earlier experiments at the same facility.
HB11 Energy’s world-first results were published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Applied Sciences, and demonstrate non-thermal fusion of hydrogen and boron-11 using high-power lasers.
This approach was predicted in the 1970’s at UNSW by Australian theoretical physicist and HB11 Energy co-founder, Professor Heinrich Hora, and differs radically from most other fusion efforts to date that require heating of hydrogen isotopes to millions of degrees.
Accordingly, the demonstration overcomes this technical hurdle that has held the field back for decades and prevented most other fusion companies from demonstrating any fusion reactions.
The experiment was a collaboration involving many of HB11 Energy’s growing list of international academic partners, and was led by HB11 Energy Lead Scientist Dimitri Batani and collaborator Daniele Margarone.
The results position HB11 Energy one huge step closer to creating clean, safe, and reliable energy at better prices and in greater abundance than all existing renewable energy sources combined.
Dr Warren McKenzie, Founder & MD of HB11 Energy, says: “The demonstration of fusion reactions alone is incredibly exciting. But on top of this, the unexpectedly high number of reactions additionally gives us important information about how to optimise our technology to further increase the fusion energy we can create.
“Creating this fusion energy will achieve wonders in the way of safe, clean, and abundant energy for the whole world.”
For nuclear fusion to have commercial applications, it must create a net energy gain whereby the energy output of a reaction significantly exceeds the energy input required to catalyse it.
HB11 Energy’s research demonstrated that its hydrogen-boron energy technology is now 4 orders of magnitude away from achieving net energy gain when catalysed by a laser. This is many orders of magnitude higher than those reported by any other fusion company, most of which have not generated any reaction despite billions of dollars invested in the field.
The results show great potential for clean energy generation: hydrogen-boron reactions use fuels that are safe and abundant, don’t create neutrons in the primary reaction so cause insignificant amounts of short-lived waste, and can provide large-scale power for base-load grid electricity or hydrogen generation.
However, the project was performed at the LFEX petawatt laser facility at Osaka University in Japan due to a lack of a local high-power laser facility, meaning Australia has a long way to go in creating sovereign capability in this critical industry, according to HB11 Energy.
Dr Warren McKenzie continued: “These findings take us one step closer to creating clean, safe, and reliable energy at better prices and in greater abundance than all the existing renewable energy sources combined.
“Our unique approach to large-scale clean electricity generation uses an aneutronic fusion reaction between hydrogen and boron-11 that does not use any radioactive fuels or generate uncontrollable radioactive waste.
https://hb11.energy/2022/03/29/world-first-hb11-energy-demonstrates-nuclear-fusion-using-a-laser/
Read the results in full: In-Target Proton–Boron Nuclear Fusion Using a PW-Class Laser article.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12/3/1444
“Operating 24/7” – solar cells don’t work like this, unless we are discussing powersats (as Forward did in one of his works on the “matter”).
Don’t bother antimatter, dreamers: dark Energy engines are the future!