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A new fusion rocket thruster concept which could power humans to Mars and beyond has been proposed by a physicist at the US Department of Energy’s plasma physics laboratory at Princeton University.
According to the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) the rocket would use magnetic fields to shoot plasma particles – electrically charged gas – into the vacuum of space.
According to Newton’s second and third laws of motion, the conservation of momentum would mean the rocket was propelled forwards.
While current space-proven plasma propulsion engines use electric fields to propel the particles, the new rocket design would accelerate them using magnetic reconnection.
This process is found throughout the universe but is most observable to humanity on the surface of the sun. When magnetic field lines converge there, before separating and then reconnect again, they product an enormous amount of energy.
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Similar energy is produced inside torus-shaped machines known as tokamaks, a magnetic confinement device which is also a leading candidate for a practical nuclear fusion reactor.
“I’ve been cooking this concept for a while,” said PPPL’s principal research physicist Dr Fatima Ebrahimi, who invented the concept and wrote the paper detailing it in the Journal of Plasma Physics.
