Oleg Zabluda's blog
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
 
Good news, everyone. Antimatter Rocket engines seem easier then ever.
Good news, everyone. Antimatter Rocket engines seem easier then ever.

When I was ~15, I did what every 15 year old does. Take non-relativistic Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, plug in numbers for matter-antimatter annihilation, producing pure photons, all radiated directly backward, and voila - relativistic delta-v with reasonable mass fraction.

When I was ~25, and already in US, I laid my hands on the "The Starflight Handbook" https://plus.google.com/112065430692128821190/posts/X5zQr7q76sc That's when bad news hit for the first time. Turned out that those are gamma photons, emitted in pairs in all directions, can't be reflected or focused, so things are bleak. Moreover, in proton-antiproton annihilation, what mostly comes out is not light, but relativistic pions, which is less efficient in terms of momentum per mass, and can't be collimated anyhow. Oh, and antimatter can't be reasonably produced.

Now that I am ~45, finally, some good news!

First of all, LHC contributed better particle-collision simulation software, which allegedly shows that resulting charged particle beam can be sufficiently collimated using 10 Tesla magnets, technology for which was also contributed to by the LHC. New calculations increase Isp from 0.33c to 0.69c, reducing mass fraction by exp(0.69)/exp(0.33)=1.4.

Second of all, antiprotons don't actually have to be produced. They can be harvested from cosmic rays, concentrated by Jupiter's magnetic field, as was announced in Aug 2011 by the PAMELA satellite team.
Woo-hoo!

And third of all, pions can be effectively stopped by Tungsten and such
http://yarchive.net/space/exotic/antimatter.html

http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_blog.aspx?id=27847
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1205/1205.2281.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payload_for_Antimatter_Matter_Exploration_and_Light-nuclei_Astrophysics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_rocket#Matter-antimatter_annihilation_rockets
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/files/86231/Antimatter%20propulsion.png

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