Cap'n There Be Anti-Matter Here!

[Tuckerfan]

Plans to harvest anti-matter from space.

Giant wire spheres may one day float near Earth, scooping up bits of antimatter for humans to use as space fuel.

The far-fetched idea is one of 12 recently selected to each receive up to $75,000 from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. The institute promotes radical schemes that would not necessarily yield results within a decade.

Antimatter particles share the same mass as their normal-matter counterparts but bear the opposite charge. And while both types of matter are thought to have been created in equal amounts in the big bang, today there is much more matter than antimatter in the universe. That is fortunate, since the two types of particles annihilate each other when they collide, producing light.

But antimatter has been produced in limited quantities in labs, and it forms naturally in the solar system when charged particles from space, called cosmic rays, slam into charged particles which stream from the Sun. Several of the funded proposals aim to collect this nearby antimatter so it could later be mixed with matter to propel spacecraft out of the solar system by utilising a solar sail.

[flight]

Bullshit on some of these. Either the people haven’t thought at all about the ideas they propoe or, more likely, the writer of the article screwed up. Why would you need a solar sail with antimatter? It’s useless. A regular rocket engine style contraption would do the same thing much smaller.

[Tuckerfan]

You might be able to find the answer by digging through the abstract which can be found here.

[flight]

Tuckerfan, thanks for the link, but the abstracts are just that. Anything the writer got about a solar sail must have either come from discussion with the researchers or his own head.