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posted by martyb on Thursday May 24 2018, @05:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the is-an-EmDrive-twice-as-wide-as-an-EnDrive? dept.

German researchers have tested their own EmDrive design as well as a Mach Effect Thruster, finding that interactions between components and Earth's magnetic field may explain anomalous thrust:

The researchers – Martin Tajmar, Matthias Kößling, Marcel Weikert and Maxime Monette – presented their findings last week at the Aeronautics and Astronautics Association of France's Space Propulsion conference. The title of their paper is "The SpaceDrive Project – First Results on EmDrive and Mach-Effect Thrusters."

[...] The TU Dresden team constructed an EmDrive similar to the NASA test model. They stuck it in a shielded vacuum chamber and bombarded it with microwaves. They were able to measure thrust but it wasn't correlated with the direction the engine was pointing, leading them to conclude the test apparatus itself was affecting the measurements. They found that "magnetic interaction from twisted-pair cables and amplifiers with the Earth's magnetic field can be a significant error source for EMDrives."

The researchers will continue to conduct more tests, and will attempt to better shield the setup from interference, scale up the power, and add a missing dielectric disc component.

Meanwhile, NASA's Harold White has released another paper, Spacedrives and Conservation Laws. At a Breakthrough Discuss conference in April, he revealed plans to scale up to 400 Watts, and got grilled by Lawrence Krauss (video) and Robert Zubrin (same video) about the physics behind the device as well as a presentation slide assuming 400 times greater thrust per kilowatt than what Eagleworks observed, enabling "intersteller [sic] precursor" missions.

Also at Ars Technica, Phys.org, and Space.com.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Thursday May 24 2018, @06:37AM (2 children)

    by BsAtHome (889) on Thursday May 24 2018, @06:37AM (#683444)

    Well, you simply jump and ever so slightly your mass will move.

    Now, if we all go to the top of the mountain, then the rotational speed of the earth would decline and our days will get longer. Does this also mean we get to extend our lives? Must be a relativity question.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @06:48AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @06:48AM (#683449)

    no. to lengthen your life, you need to go to the most intense gravitational field you can find, so sea-level would be better (I guess the South Pole would be ideal, since that's where the Earth is "dent").