How could antimatter engines fly humans to other stars in just a few years?

• Antimatter engines could be humanity’s ticket to interstellar travel.

• When antimatter particles come into contact with normal matter, they produce large amounts of energy.

• This energy, if we learn to use it, can take us to Pluto in just a few weeks.

Interstellar travel is something humanity has achieved in science fiction; like Star Trek’s USS Enterprise, which uses antimatter engines to travel between star systems.

But antimatter isn’t just a science fiction trope. Antimatter really exists.

Elon Musk called the antimatter force “interstellar travel ticket,” and physicists like Ryan Weed are exploring how to take advantage of this.

Antimatter consists of particles that are almost like normal matter but have the opposite electrical charge. This means that antimatter will both annihilate and produce enormous amounts of energy when it comes into contact with normal matter.

“The destruction of antimatter and matter directly converts mass into energy,” Weed, co-founder and CEO of Positron Dynamics, a company working to develop an antimatter propulsion system, told Business Insider.

Just one gram of antimatter can create an explosion equivalent to a nuclear bomb. Some say it’s the kind of energy that can boldly take us where no one has gone before at record speed.

Space travel at record speed

The benefit of all this energy is that it can be used to accelerate or slow down the spacecraft to extremely high speeds.

For example, let’s take a trip to Proxima, our nearest star system, which is about 4.2 light-years away.

Weed said in 2016 that an antimatter engine could theoretically accelerate a spacecraft by 1g (9.8 square meters per second), taking us to Proxima in just five years. That’s 8,000 times faster than the speed of Voyager 1, one of the fastest spacecraft in history. to travel half Distance according to NASA.

Even in our own solar system, an antimatter-powered spacecraft could reach Pluto in 3.5 weeks, compared to the 9.5 years it took NASA’s New Horizons probe to arrive, Weed said.

The story continues

Why don’t we have antimatter engines?

The reason we don’t have antimatter engines, despite their tremendous capabilities, is due to cost, not technology.

Accelerator physicist Gerald Jackson, who works on antimatter projects at Fermilab, told Forbes in 2016 that with enough funding, we could have an antimatter spacecraft prototype within a decade.

The basic technology is there. Armed with the world’s most powerful particle accelerators, physicists have produced antiprotons and antihydrogen atoms.

The problem is that this type of antimatter is incredibly expensive to produce. It is considered the most expensive substance in the world. Jackson gave us an idea of ​​how much it would cost to build and maintain an antimatter machine.

Jackson is the founder, chairman and CEO of Hbar Technologies, which is working on an antimatter space sail concept that would slow down spacecraft accelerating the speed of light by 1% to 10%; It is a useful design for orbiting a distant star. The planet or moon you want to study.

Jackson said he designed an asymmetric proton collider that could produce 20 grams of antimatter per year.

“For a 10-kilogram scientific package traveling at 2% of the speed of light, 35 grams of antimatter is needed to slow the spacecraft and inject it into orbit around Proxima Centauri,” Jackson told BI.

He said it would take $8 billion to build a solar power plant to meet the enormous energy needs of antimatter production and cost $670 million annually to operate.

This is the idea for now. “There is currently no significant funding for advanced space propulsion concepts,” Jackson said.

But there are other ways to produce antimatter. This was where Weed focused his work.

Weed’s concept involves positrons, the antimatter version of the electron.

A different kind of antimatter engine

Weed said positrons are “several thousand times lighter than antiprotons and don’t produce as much effect during annihilation.”

But the advantage is that they occur naturally and do not require a giant accelerator and billions of dollars.

Weed’s antimatter propulsion system was designed to use krypton-79, a form of the element krypton that naturally emits positrons.

The engine system will first collect high-energy positrons from krypton-79 and then direct them to the normal matter layer, generating annihilation energy. This energy will then trigger a powerful fusion reaction that will create thrust for the spacecraft.

Although positrons are cheaper to obtain than stronger forms of antimatter, they are difficult to use because they are highly energetic and must be slowed down or “moderated.” Creating a prototype to be tested in space is still out of reach in terms of cost, Weed said.

This is the case for all antimatter thrust designs. Over the decades, scientists have proposed dozens of concepts, but none of them have come to fruition.

For example, in 1953, Austrian physicist Eugen Sänger proposed a “photon rocket” that would operate on positron annihilation energy. And since the ’80s, there’s been talk of thermal antimatter engines that would use antimatter to heat liquid, gas, or plasma to provide thrust.

Weed said of the engine concept: “It’s not science fiction, but we won’t see it fly until there’s a significant ‘mission shot’.”

Can it work?

Paul M. Sutter, an astrophysicist and host of the “Ask a Spaceman” podcast, told BI that “the devil is in the engineering details” to build Weed’s concept at a starship scale.

“We’re talking about a device that uses truly tremendous amounts of energy, requiring perfect balance and control,” Sutter said.

Overall, this immense energy is another obstacle holding us back from revolutionizing space travel. Physicist Steve Howe, who worked on antimatter concepts with NASA in the ’90s, told BI that “if something goes wrong, it’s big explosions” during testing.

“So we need the ability to test systems with high energy density that do not threaten the biosphere but still allow us to develop them,” said Howe, who thinks the Moon could be a good testing base. “And if something goes wrong, you’ll melt a piece of the Moon, not the Earth,” he added.

Antimatter tends to unleash the imagination of anyone who studies it. “But we need crazy but plausible ideas to take it further into space, so it’s worth investigating,” Sutter said.

Weed echoes the same thought, saying, “Until there’s a compelling reason to get to the Kuiper Belt, the Solar Gravitational Lens, or Alpha Centauri really quickly – or maybe until we try to return large asteroids for mining – we’ll be able to get to the Kuiper Belt, the Solar Gravitational Lens, or Alpha Centauri really quickly.” “Progress will continue to be slow.” this area.”

Read the original article on Business Insider