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3 million kilometers per hour by 2010

 
 
neil
 
Reply Wed 16 Feb, 2005 12:07 pm
ESA recently used an ion engine to travel to the moon over a period of several months. We should soon be able to build an ion engine or equivelent which emits particles at much faster speed. This will greatly increase the thrust without increasing the ejection mass. Let's assume the craft accelerates at 1/10 th meter per second per second for ten million seconds = 2777 hours = 116 days. V = at = 1/10 times ten million = one million meters per second = 1000 kilometers per second = 3,600,000 kilometers per hour = 1/300 of the speed of light.
S = 1/2 at squared = 1/20 times 10 E14 = 5 times 10E12 meters = 10E9 kilometers = one billion kilometers.
We can now coast for millions of years at an average speed over 3 million kilometers per hour. About 116 days before our destination we turn the craft around and decelerate at about the same rate so we can land, orbit or do a slow fly by of our destination, about 2 billion kilometers from Earth/one of the moons of Uranus perhaps in about 232 days, which is much less time than using rockets and gravity assist maneuvers. Please comment, refute and/or embellish. Neil
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bobsmythhawk
 
  1  
Reply Wed 16 Feb, 2005 12:54 pm
Wow! Hope we don't get a ticket. tellme, did you figure this out or is it information readily available? That's a dramatic performance.
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neil
 
  1  
Reply Wed 16 Feb, 2005 09:19 pm
It's my arithmetic, but science fiction authors have been making similar claims for decades. The 1/10 meter per second per second may be over optimistic as the ion engine auxillary equipment is heavy and even one gram per second adds up to 100 metric tons of reaction mass in 100 million seconds. Perhaps we could deliver additional reaction mass partway though the trip. Neil
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