From: Ron Blue (rcb5@msn.com)
Date: Fri Jul 26 2002 - 08:29:08 PDT
A magnetic sail is used to get thrust from microwaves sent from earth based
radio transmitters. The trailling wire is used to slow down the ship for
better picture taking when it gets to the next solar system. You could use
the electricity generated by the wire to sent the pictures to earth.
Good question. The current produced was so strong that it burned out the
wire deployed from the space shuttle. You could temporary store that much
power input into spinning gyroscopes. It was suggested that if you had ring
of gyroscopes and mechanically forced them to turn around the circle you
would get forward motion. In orbit over along period of time you could use
this for some control. Assuming this was true, one large circle of
flywheel energy storage devices and two small circle flywheel energy
storage devices could be used to deflect the direction.
I can not grasps these concepts because it seems to me that all the forces
should cancel out and you get nothing. There are no free lunches. For
example we exchange at a very high cost the energy sent to a probe with no
fuel for energy stored in it at very low efficiency as forward momentum.
Ron Blue
"Gary Hoffman" <ghoffman@spacetech.com>
> Ok... so,
>
> You deploy a long wire.
>
> It moves through local magnetic fields...
>
> Thus a small EMF is induced in the wire...
>
> You conduct the small EMF into the craft....
>
> And you produce THRUST with it HOW ???
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