EmDrive

The electromagnetic drive, or EmDrive, converts electricity into thrust simply by bouncing around microwaves in a closed cavity.

The proposal of the Em Drive appears to contradict physics.

But Nov 2016 a NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Physics Research Laboratory, informally known as Eagleworks team suggests the EmDrive really does work

EmDrive NASA prototype

The claim is that this prototype EmDrive is capable of producing 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt of energy (around 300 times more efficient than a solar sail)

The EmDrive generating thrust by bouncing around electromagnetic energy (in this case, microwave photons) in a closed, cone-shaped chamber. As those photons collide with the chamber’s walls, they somehow propel the device forward, despite the fact that nothing is released from the chamber. By contrast, ion drives now in use on some NASA spacecraft create thrust by ionizing a propellant, often xenon gas, and shooting out beams of charged atoms.

The long-standing catch is that the EmDrive seemingly defies the laws of classical physics, so even if it’s doing what the team claims, scientists still aren’t sure how the thing actually works as it violates Newton’s third law and also the conservation of momentum.

Much more experimentation is definitely needed, preferably in space and if it is proved to work, in theory, such a lightweight engine could send a spacecraft to Mars in just 70 days.

In the Space Propulsion 2018 conference in Seville, Spain, A German team, led by Martin Tajmar of the Institute of Aerospace Engineering at Technische Universität Dresden, presented its results. the analysis "clearly indicates that the 'thrust' is not coming from the EmDrive but from some electromagnetic interaction," That interaction is likely between EmDrive power cables and Earth's magnetic field, the team concluded.

Exosnews Comment

This may lead to another exciting possibility of using the Earth's and even the Sun's magnetic fields to power propulsion using no on board mass required for traditional thrusters.

China

In Dec 2016 Chinese scientists claimed they’ve created a working prototype of the ‘impossible’ reactionless engine – and they say they’re already testing it in orbit aboard the Tiangong-2 space laboratory.

According to Li Feng, chief designer of Cast’s communication satellite division, their team has also built a prototype that so far generates a few millinewtons of thrust,

‘This technology is currently in the latter stages of the proof-of-principle phase, with the goal of making the technology available in satellite engineering as quickly as possible,’.

According to Brice Cassenti, it’s extremely difficult to be certain that all sources of error have been eliminated, and this can only be proven through independent tests of the hypothesis, If the EmDrive results do turn out to be valid, the achievement ‘points to new physics.’