#Em drive faster than light series

The thruster is far less powerful than conventional rockets, and even the ion engines currently in use on some NASA spacecraft, but both of those thruster designs require fuel to be carried on board. The device runs only on electricity, meaning that a spacecraft wouldn’t need to bring any fuel along with it and could power itself using only solar panels. Moving the experiment to a vacuum provides a more perfect environment to run tests in.īesides opening up new realms of physics, a propellant-less device like the EmDrive would be extremely useful for extended missions in space. A prominent criticism of earlier tests was that the heat generated by the device could have been responsible for the apparent movement. In an important move, they tested the EmDrive in vacuum conditions as well, and report that it performs nearly the same. Their results indicate that the device puts out 1.2 millinewtons of thrust - or enough to accelerate a satellite weighing one kilogram to one mile per hour over the course of about six minutes - for every kilowatt of power put through it. They tested the device at different levels of current and received positive results every time. To test whether the EmDrive produced thrust, the researchers mounted it on a pendulum that would swing to indicate movement. In addition, no one has yet replicated their experiment and produced similar results, another key step in the process. There could still be experimental flaws that no one has been able to catch yet. Passing peer review simply means that other scientists have examined their data and methodology and declared them sound. That doesn’t mean that the EmDrive actually works though. With this paper, published in the Journal of Propulsion and Power, the researchers have cleared an initial hurdle on the path to legitimacy. And EmDrive tests have never before passed peer review, meaning that the results weren’t looked over by other scientists. Tests of the device have been subject to some glaring flaws, and one Chinese team was forced to retract the results of a 2012 experiment after concluding that they were due to thermal expansion in the test device. This violation of fundamental principles has drawn criticism from the scientific community ever since the device was first proposed in the early 2000’s by British researcher Roger Shawyer. For example, conventional propellant-based rockets are pushed forward by the ejection of superheated gas from the nozzle.Ĭritics liken the EmDrive to trying to move a car by getting inside and pushing on the windshield. This is in opposition to the laws of physics as we understand them, which state that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction. The drive works by bouncing microwaves around the inside of a cone-shaped chamber, apparently producing thrust even though nothing is being emitted from the device. They say their methodology accounted for nearly all possible errors and returned results indicating that the device produced thrust, an apparent violation of Newton’s Third Law of Motion.

#Em drive faster than light series

After years of unwarranted hype and dubious experimental claims, the EmDrive, an “impossible” propulsion device that claims to produce thrust while violating Newton’s Laws of Motion, has received its first published, peer-reviewed paper.Ī team of researchers from the NASA-affiliated Eagleworks lab published a paper last week describing a series of tests on the EmDrive.