junglelord wrote: Solar wind indeed. Birkeland proved over 100 years ago, its not wind, its current.
PLEASE NASA GET WITH THE TERMINOLOGY DIRECTIVE, PLEASE...
GAS AND WIND, VS PLASMA AND CURRENT...YOU FIGURE OUT IF YOUR TERMINOLOGY SUCKS
Mmmm, aha, I see your point, sir.
But then Junglelord, how about this. ESA Engineers at work !
"ESA accelerates towards a new space thruster"
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM6HSVLWFE_index_0.html
“Essentially the concept exploits a natural phenomenon we see taking place in space,” says Dr Roger Walker of ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team. "When the solar wind, a ‘plasma’ of electrified gas released by the Sun, hits the magnetic field of the Earth, it creates a boundary consisting of two plasma layers. Each layer has differing electrical properties and this can accelerate some particles of the solar wind across the boundary, causing them to collide with the Earth’s atmosphere and create the aurora.
ehm, "When the
solar wind, a ‘plasma’ of electrified gas released by the Sun " Come on Junglelord, thats neutral in my opinion. They really said electrified gas. Shit. Then again, who in the bloody universe is blowing that wind.
1 point for big nonsense. 1 point for electrified gas.
Match
score: 1 - 1 for ESA vs big nonsense!
Researchers Christine Charles and Rod Boswell at the Australian National University in Canberra, first created plasma double layers in their laboratory in 2003 and realised their accelerating properties could enable new spacecraft thrusters. This led the group to develop a prototype called the Helicon Double Layer Thruster.
Sorry, but a good score for ESA: 3 - 1
To create the double layer, Chabert and colleagues created a hollow tube around which was wound a radio antenna. Argon gas was continuously pumped into the tube and the antenna transmitted helicoidal radio waves of 13 megahertz. This ionised the argon creating a plasma. A diverging magnetic field at the end of the tube then forced the plasma leaving the pipe to expand. This allowed two different plasmas to be formed, upstream within the tube and downstream, and so the double layer was created at their boundary. This accelerated further argon plasma from the tube into a supersonic beam, creating thrust.
Mmm... 5 - 1 because its sounds so cool. Let's go: supersonic plasmabeam. What is the difference again between a plasma beam and a plasma jet? Mr Junglelord?
But wait.
Plasma can be thought of as the fourth state of matter. Just as solids, liquids and gases have different properties, so too does plasma. It is a gas in which the atoms have been stripped of some of their electrons, meaning that it responds to the influence of electric and magnetic fields. It is estimated the 99% of the matter in the Universe is plasma. On Earth, however, naturally occurring plasma is rare, apart from within the layer of the atmosphere called the ionosphere.
Rare? Only ionosphere?
It was a text from 13 December 2005. Besides that it was an editor of the ESA that put that explanation in.
But I want his job. NOW. Sorry for that.
Big nonsense: 1 point.
Endscore: ESA vs big nonsense 5 - 2
Junglelord, this is fun. Let's make this into a hobby. Editing texts and giving out scores.
Okay Im off to bed. And please let someone turn off that noisy solar wind fan for me. Thanks.
Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. -Nikola Tesla -1934