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Researchers led by NASA's former chief technologist are hoping to launch a satellite carrying water as the source of its fuel. The team from Cornell University, guided by Mason Peck, want their device to become the first shoebox-sized "CubeSat" to orbit the moon, while demonstrating the potential of water as a source of spacecraft fuel. It's a safe, stable substance that's relatively common even in space, but could also find greater use here on Earth as we search for alternatives to fossil fuels.
Water is a way around this issue because it is essentially an energy carrier rather than a fuel. The Cornell team isn't planning to use water itself as a propellant but to rather use electricity from solar panels to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen and use them as the fuel. The two gasses, when recombined and ignited will burn or explode, giving out the energy that they took in during the splitting process. This combustion of gasses can be used to drive the satellite forward, gaining speed or altering its position in orbit of whichever desired planet or moon is the target.
Solar panels, with high reliability and no moving parts, are ideally suited to operate in zero gravity and in the extreme environments of space, producing current from sunlight and allowing the satellite to actively engage on its mission. Traditionally this energy is stored in batteries. But the Cornell scientists want to use it to create their fuel source by splitting the on-board water.
Source: http://phys.org/news/2016-09-space-rocket-fuel-power-revolution.html
(Score: 2, Interesting) by butthurt on Thursday September 29 2016, @11:07PM
Thank you, space people, but we already use this technology.
The oxy-hydrogen blowpipe was developed by English mineralogist Edward Daniel Clarke and American chemist Robert Hare in the early nineteenth century. It produced a flame hot enough to melt such refractory materials as platinum, porcelain, fire brick, and corundum, and was a valuable tool in several fields of science.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyhydrogen [wikipedia.org]
DR. CLARKE'S EXPERIMENTS WITH THE OXY-HYDROGEN BLOWPIPE.
781. The series of experiments made by Dr Clarke with the gas blowpipe, was the most important which has ever been made on mineral bodies exposed to so high a temperature. In a work like the present it is, therefore, but right to bestow a considerable degree of attention upon these experiments. We have consequently drawn up a short description of the most remarkable phenomena attending the fusion of various bodies which were tried, and of the results which that fusion produced. The length of this account, much as we have studied brevity in its composition, incroaches considerably on the limits of our little volume; yet we consider it of too important a nature to be farther shortened or omitted.—The student will acquire a fund of useful information by the comparison of these experiments with those described in the preceding pages as made with the mouth blowpipe; the results in the two cases, when a mineral is assayed with the gas and with the common blowpipe, being sometimes exceedingly curious. If he possesses a gas blowpipe, this account will serve as a manual whereby he may direct his operations; and should he be desirous of acquiring more extensive information on the subject, he has only to consult "The Gas Blowpipe, or the Art of Fusion by Burning the Gaseous constituents of Water," published by Dr Clarke about eight years ago.
-- https://books.google.com/books?id=YbsQAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA270&output=text#PA270 [google.com]