Magnetic Shielding

[alexterrell]

This is being portrayed as a bit of a breakthrough, which might be good PR. According to the Daily Telegraph they're taking out patents which is interesting since patents last 20 years.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7706844.stm

Would you depend on this for your life?

Are there uncharged particles to worry about?

[glanmor05]

Would you depend on this for your life?

We do already don't we?

[William Barton]

Would you depend on this for your life?

We do already don't we?

Astronauts on a long-range space mission would be at the mercy of their technology anyway, so this seems just one more item on the list.  There are lots of things like this on a smaller scale in every day life. The brakes on your car fer instance. New tech is always risky. I'm sure the first guy who stepped out of a plane with a packed, deployable parachute was real nervous.

[8900]

Need a nuclear reactor to supply the required energy to produce such a strong magnetic field in real spacecraft?

[hyper_snyper]

Need a nuclear reactor to supply the required energy to produce such a strong magnetic field in real spacecraft?

I like how all the major advances in spacecraft technology require a nuclear power source.  VASIMR: fast, efficient propulsion? Need a nuke.  Ion shield?  Need a nuke.  Long term surface stays on Mars?  Need a nuke.

I mean come on.  We're running out of excuses here.  Hopefully there will be a strong demand for those one day.  I suspect that's when things will really start to get interesting.

[nacnud]

From the article

"The team has had to take into account the physics of plasmas at the comparatively tiny human scale. To create its metre-sized trial, the team used a plasma jet and a simple $20 magnet. "

[I14R10]

Why is this such a problem? Earth's magnetic field isn't strong. I think it's magnitude of mT. You can easy make an electromagnet that strong at home. Why would this be a problem?

[nacnud]

Because the Earth's field is vast, this is only a metre across. No one was sure it would work the same.

[MTKeshe]

This is an old article which was put out about over a year ago.

The magnetic shielding using nuclear power reactors is a fact which will be used in near future initially in soft way for protection of satellite from cosmic dust in Feb 2009 and then in space technology.

Magnetic shielding through small nuclear reactors and its effect has been tested in July this year and proven to be correct.

The beauty of this shielding is that it creates nuclear shielding at the same time.

What this means, is  that when we measured the spherical magnetic shielding during testing, nuclear counters showed high levels of radiation is surrounding area of the system over 15 times the dimension of the reactor in the lab, but strangely enough no radiation effect.

This originally puzzled us, but in fact , this it is correct according to nuclear decay principle.


Magnetic shielding is not a dream and is a reality now, we are looking for institutes for further development and testing before man flights in the near future ( 12-18 month).

This shielding should stop the incoming rays to interact with soft tissue cells of astronauts, or as they see it like flashes in their eye when it enters the eyeball at this moment in space flights.

NASA is paying a scientific group to build a helmet for astronauts, to stop the damages to their brain, but using, the magnetic field created in a nuclear reactor similar to the inner construction of the earth in the past month has shown that these, rays can be stopped, due to the principle of the interaction magnetospheric condition generated by the magnetic field of the system and its surrounding fields like earth or its interaction, with the magnetic field of the sun in space, very similar to our own magneto spherical shield around the earth.

It is interesting too, that we have observed shining  silver’esh colour around the system where the magnetosphere has been.

This raises the question, that, would we see silvery shining light when ever we launch a system using magnetic shield systems?

The effect of magnetic shielding raises another question??? That, would magnetic shielding , itself creates radiation hazards of its own , or is there a threshold, of magnetic fields that we can not allow the systems of the future pass as they can be harmless to our cells.

[alexterrell]

If this story is a year old, why the prominence in BBC and Telegraph?

Perhaps something similar was done in the USA a year ago. But magnetic shielding is not yet reality in space. Let's hope it will be soon.

The Telegraph article stated that a human crew could be protected by a device consuming 3KW. It's not clear whether that be refrigeration for superconductors.

In terms of magnetic field effects on humans, the developers of maglev trains have done a lot of work on this. Watches and pacemakers tend to go before the humans. Though of course, humans would never spend six months in a maglev train.

[iamlucky13]

Either I'm missing something here, or this couldn't possibly be major news. It sounds like perhaps the first time anyone has tried a spacecraft-like analogy, but we've been using magnetic fields of varying magnitudes and geometries to deflect charged particles of varying energies for decades. Here's just one example of an application:

[Lampyridae]

Hardly breaking news. But I think it's the first time anybody's ever tried deflecting solar-equivalent protons with a simple magnet. And scale is an important consideration.

Most of the other proposals involved strange stuff like using a torus magnet to defocus the solar wind and reduce the flux. This is just so much simpler. Unfortunately whether or not it will do anything for cosmic ray flux remains to be seen! Considering the energies these things come in at, I doubt such a small field would do much to cut them.

[8900]

Need a nuclear reactor to supply the required energy to produce such a strong magnetic field in real spacecraft?

I like how all the major advances in spacecraft technology require a nuclear power source.  VASIMR: fast, efficient propulsion? Need a nuke.  Ion shield?  Need a nuke.  Long term surface stays on Mars?  Need a nuke.

I mean come on.  We're running out of excuses here.  Hopefully there will be a strong demand for those one day.  I suspect that's when things will really start to get interesting.

Yes, you are right
BUT there is a serious problem
launching a nuclear reactor into space is considered as a very risky act
since the LVs with best safety track records have ~1% of failure probaility
You can launch a small nuclear reactor into space if you want
given the >100mT to LEO capability of Ares V
the tricky question is: what IF the Ares V carring the reactor exploded
halfway up there?
you can't add a launch escape system for cargo flight like manned flight right?
the main concern now is safety, launching reactor into space is technically doable even with curent technology
in fact this has been done back in Cold War time

[ugordan]

You can launch a small nuclear reactor into space if you want

Excuse my ignorance, but aren't there nuclear weapon-related treaties now in place that prohibit launching fissile materials into space?

[kraisee]

I think those only refer to military usage WRT the "weaponization of space".   Civilian use of nuclear materials is still permitted.

Ross.

[ugordan]

Ah, I see. I seem to remember there were issues with the long canceled Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter about launching a fission reactor into space.

I can uderstand why it would be a touchy subject even for civilian use, any object containing fissiles and on a ballistic trajectory could raise hairs upon detection via respective U.S./Russian early warning satellites. You sure wouldn't want to mistake that for a warhead! More benign things almost were in the past, after all 

[robertross]

{snip}

The effect of magnetic shielding raises another question??? That, would magnetic shielding , itself creates radiation hazards of its own , or is there a threshold, of magnetic fields that we can not allow the systems of the future pass as they can be harmless to our cells.

Not only on human cells, but space hardware as well. You would almost need shielding from the magnetic shielding for both. However I think that can be mitigated with more lightweight materials, like EMI shielded enclosures for CATV & RF devices: a thin perfectly sealed metal can. Makes me think of a poster on this site who uses the term 'sardines anyone?'. lol

[iamlucky13]

I don't believe there's a whole lot of concern if the magnetic field isn't changing, which would be the case here.

The field would change for any particle not moving at the same speed as it, hence how it works, but not for someone sitting practically still.

[robertross]

I don't believe there's a whole lot of concern if the magnetic field isn't changing, which would be the case here.

The field would change for any particle not moving at the same speed as it, hence how it works, but not for someone sitting practically still.

I would tend to disagree on that one. Even though planetary magnetic fields remain fairly tight, they still extend outwards a fair distance. You would have magnetic fields from the Earth and Mars to deal with, particularly the later. If there were a need to stay in Orbit around Mars, the changing flux density would be considerable for each orbit.

There would also be the effects of interaction of various particles intersecting and colliding with the magentic field. We are fairly immune to those effects down here, but outside of Earth's magnetic field, we can't be 100% sure. Having a lunar outpost to test such technologies would be helpful imo.

Also, the astronauts would be moving around, not confined to their seats for 6-months. And if they used a partial gravity approach to the spacecraft for the long journey, the shield design would be interesting.

[8900]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/miniature-nuclear-reactors-los-alamos

interesting news
small-size nuclear reactor based on existing technology...
it can probably be redesigned into a space version
and if the description on the size is correct
20mT to LEO EELV should be able to launch it into space