April 2020
Plasma Clipper - opening the age of sail, in space travel
... can be created from a current loop – a simple loop of wire with a current flowing through it creates a magnetic field. The problem is that the magnetic field needed for this technology to work has to be big, kilometres of radius big, not metres, and...
August 2019
Lessons from the Sun
... Earth’s high latitudes to be more slowly redistributed. We are left to contemplate the effects of a similar event with a leading magnetic field anti-aligned for a long interval. It seems safe to say that the resulting geomagnetic storm would have...
09 July 2021
Astronomers solve 40-year-old mystery of what causes Jupiter’s X-ray auroras
... repelled and sent back out into space, the ions are being trapped in Jupiter’s magnetic field. When this happens the magnetic field gets compressed, which in turn heats up the ions. This then triggers a phenomenon called electromagnetic...
11 February 2019
Earth's magnetic north pole is on the move and its going fast
... pouring out from the Sun. This shield, or rather magnetic field as we know it by, also means that our planet comes...over three times as fast as it usually does. Without the magnetic field, our little world would most likely resemble that of our ...
March 2016
Saving Earth from an Expanding Sun
... an ionosphere). Now you no longer have the armature of a dynamo but that of a motor. You’re cranking against Earth’s magnetic field and the electrodynamic tether rises. Space elevators Clearly this is a relative of the now-famous space elevator...
October 2020
Superconductors - key to unlocking high power space missions
... and optimised propellant injection mechanisms. HTS can be applied to other EP technologies which also require the use of magnetic fields, such as Hall-effect thrusters and Helicon Plasma Thrusters. Here, the use of HTS enables mass reduction...
