Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Mars Satellite’s First Weather Report

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its Mars Climate Sounder instrument. Credit: JPL

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The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling Mars for over two years now, and has provided unprecedented views of the Red Planet with its HiRISE Camera. But did you also know that MRO is a weather-monitoring satellite, too? The Mars Climate Sounder instrument is examining the Martian atmosphere and has issued its first Mars weather report. “It has taken 20 years and three missions but we finally have an instrument in orbit that gives us a detailed view of the entire atmosphere of Mars and it is already giving us fresh insights into the Martian climate,” said Professor Fred Taylor of Oxford University. Within a paper issued by the Mars ‘weather team’ comes surprising news: during the freezing Martian winter the atmosphere above the planet’s South Pole is considerably warmer than predicted.

The team discovered that even in the depths of the Martian winter, when the planet’s South Pole is frozen and in total darkness, at an altitude of 30-80km the atmosphere is being heated to 180 Kelvin – that’s 10-20 Kelvin warmer than expected.

“Winter at the Martian South Pole is severe even by the standards of our Antarctic,” said Professor Taylor. “The Pole is shrouded in total darkness for many months and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere freezes, creating blizzards and causing a thick layer of carbon dioxide ice to form across the surface. Yet what we’ve found is that 30 kilometers above the surface conditions are very different.”

The team, which also included Oxford physicists Dr Pat Irwin and Dr Simon Calcutt, believe that a vigorous circulation of the atmosphere – from the Martian equator to the Pole – is compressing the gas and causing the heating effect.

“It’s the same effect that warms the cylinder of a bicycle pump, or the pistons of a car engine, when you compress the gas inside,” said Taylor. “What we think we are observing is that the ‘engine’ of the Martian climate – this atmospheric circulation – is running as much as 50 per cent faster than our models predicted, resulting in this warming of the South Pole.”

These are just the first results from what the scientists hope will be many more years of study. In the long-term they hope to shed light on climate change on Mars, what controls it and what lessons can be drawn for climate change on Earth.

Studying the Martian climate helps us understand how a planet that was originally similar to Earth turned out so very different.

The team’s paper, ‘Intense polar temperature inversion in the middle atmosphere on Mars’, was published in Nature Geoscience on Oct. 12, 2008.

Source: Oxford University

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Where Are the Images from Asteroid 2008 TC3?

Asteroid-2008-tc3. From Kite Power El Gouna web cam.

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One of the big news items last week was the prediction that an asteroid was on a collision course with Earth. Although it was a small space rock – estimates ranged from 1-5 meters (3-15 feet), scientists were excited because this was the first time an asteroid was discovered with an imminent known impact. Granted, we’d all probably feel a little safer if we knew about this asteroid, named 2008 TC3, days or months ahead of time instead of only 19 hours, but it’s a step in the right direction. Astronomers even predicted correctly the asteroid would come through the atmosphere over Africa. So with this prediction, many were hoping someone with a camera would be watching the skies of Sudan. But the flight path of the object was over a remote area and so far the only ground-based image that has surfaced is the one shown here, taken by a webcam from a beach in Egypt. (The words on the image indicate the objects on the beach — which were illuminated by the fairly distant explosion low on the horizon. try to find the tiny bright spot in the center of the image — that’s the asteroid.) But we do have satellites constantly monitoring Earth’s atmosphere and a few of them captured images and data about 2008 TC3. However, it’s not known if any parts of the meteoroid hit the ground.

The explosion was recorded directly by the cameras of a European weather satellite called METEOSAT-8. This was taken in infrared, and the temperature scale on the right is in Kelvin.

Asteroid 2008 TC3 seen from space in infrared. Credit: EUMETSAT
Asteroid 2008 TC3 seen from space in infrared. Credit: EUMETSAT

Data from this satellite helped determine the asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere at a velocity of 12.8 kilometers per second. “As it entered the Earth’s atmosphere, it compressed the air in front of it. The compression heated the air, which in turn heated the object to create a spectacular fireball, releasing huge amounts of energy as it disintegrated and exploded in the atmosphere, dozens of kilometers above ground,” the Eumetsat website explains. Meteostat also took a visible image:
Visible light flash of 2008 TC3. Credit: EUMETSAT

Also, according JPL’s Near Earth Object Program, an undisclosed U.S. system has monitored the airburst and yielded a precise time (02:45:45 UTC) and explosive energy equivalent (0.9 to 1.0 kT of TNT). The NEO office also said, “Tthe follow-up astrometric observations from professional and sophisticated amateur astronomers alike were rather extraordinary, with 570 observations from 26 observatories being reported between the time of discovery by the Catalina Sky Survey to just before the object entered Earth’s shadow (57 minutes prior to impact).” These observations revealed a tumbling, rotating object. The CAST astronomical observatory created a “movie” of their observations of the asteroid before it entered into Earth’s shadow.

CAST astronomical obervatory in Italy created this 2008tc3 animation.
CAST astronomical obervatory in Italy created this 2008tc3 animation.

Here’s links to a few other ground based observatories and their pre-impact sightings: from Eric Allen of Observatoire du Cegep de Trois-Rivieres, Champlain, Quabec; from Ernesto Guido et al. of Remanzacco Observatory, Italy; from S.Korotkiy and T.Kryachko of Kazan State University Astrotel observatory, Russia

Also, SpaceWeather.com reported the crew of an airplane saw a flash in the sky which may have been from this object. But beyond that, sadly, there’s not many images available related to this extraordinary event. If any surface, we’ll be sure to post them.

Sources: SpaceWeather.com, Cosmos4U, Planetary Society Blog, JPL NEO Program

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

‘Little’ Gamma Ray Bursts Really Do Exist

Artist impression of a GRB. Credits: ESA, illustration by ESA/ECF

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Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are powerful blasts of energy that flash across the Universe. For a brief time, they are the brightest objects in the gamma-ray sky. Astronomers estimate that about 1,400 GRBs per year occur but because no one knows when and where they are going to appear, only a part of them happen to be detected. ESA’s Integral gamma-ray observatory detects about 10 GRBs a year, and those are of the big burst variety. But the spacecraft has observed several low-luminosity gamma-ray bursts, confirming the existence of an entire population of weaker bursts that have hardly been noticed so far. These aren’t just bursts from far away, but just weak bursts that are relatively close by. And astronomers are beginning to think these weak or faint variety of GRBs might be the most common.

When studying Integral’s gamma-ray burst data, Prof. Lorraine Hanlon from the School of Physics, University College Dublin, Ireland, and her colleagues, realized that some of the faintest bursts have distinctive gamma-ray emissions, and also present faint afterglows in the lower-energy X-ray and visible wavelengths.

Since, in general, GRBs are colossal explosions of energy triggered by the collision of very massive and compact objects such as neutron stars or black holes, or by the explosion of incredibly powerful supernovae, or hypernovae, one may think that these bursts are perceived as faint just because they take place very far away from us, in the remote corners of the Universe.

However, Prof. Hanlon and colleagues noticed that these faint bursts, just at the sensitivity threshold of IBIS, seem to originate in our cosmic neighborhood, within the nearby clusters of galaxies.

Distribution of faint GRBs. Credits: S. Foley/UCD
Distribution of faint GRBs. Credits: S. Foley/UCD

“If the bursts we have studied are so ‘close’ in cosmological terms, it means that they are faint from the beginning,” says Hanlon. “From this we can deduce that the processes triggering them could be less energetic than those generating the more powerful bursts we are more used to observing.”

The study team suggests that the faint bursts may be generated by the collapse of a massive star that does not present the characteristics of a supernova, or by the merger of two white dwarfs (small and dense stars about the size of Earth), or by the merger of a white dwarf with a neutron star or a black hole.

“Past observations had already hinted the existence of faint GRBs, and thanks to Integral’s sensitivity we can now say that an entire population of them exist,” added Hanlon. “Actually, their rate may even be higher than that of the most luminous GRBs but, just because they are weaker, we may be only able to see those which are relatively close by.”

“More Integral observations in the coming years will definitively help us understand the phenomenon of faint GRBs, and to explore the nature of this newly observed population,” she concluded.

Source: ESA

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

The Universe Is Not Expanding Uniformly

Partial map of the Local Group of galaxies. Credit: Planet Quest

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A few weeks ago, researchers announced the discovery of a “dark flow” of invisible matter tugging at distant galaxy clusters at the edge of the universe. Now comes more evidence of unseen and unknown forces in the cosmos, but this time its closer to home. A group of researchers have discovered that our particular part of the Universe — out to a distance of 400 million light years — is not expanding uniformly in all directions as expected. To be exact, the expansion is faster in one half of the sky than in the other. “It’s as if, in addition to the expansion, our ‘neighbourhood’ in the Universe has an extra kick in a certain direction,” says Mike Hudson from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. “We expected the expansion to become more uniform on increasingly larger scales, but that’s not what we found.” If confirmed, their findings will result in a new understanding of the origin of structure in the universe and possible revisions to the standard cosmological model.

Hudson and two other scientists have been conducting research on large-scale cosmic flows and the general expansion of the universe. This expansion increases the distances between galaxies steadily with time, and is called the Hubble flow. Deviations of the velocity of galaxies from the overall Hubble flow is called the “peculiar velocity.” By examining the peculiar velocities of clusters and superclusters scientists can obtain estimates of local mass concentrations that may be responsible for causing any deviations from the Hubble flow.

In particular, these researchers were attempting to address a longstanding question about the origin of the approximately 600 km/s peculiar velocity of the Local Group of galaxies, with respect to the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Using several different surveys they discovered that about 50% of the Local Group’s motion is faster than anticipated. To produce this motion, they believe there must be large unseen and unknown structures in the universe. They write, “The large value of the residual motion implies that there are significant velocities generated by very-large scale structures,” and the structures lie beyond the Local Group.

Brian McNamara, a University Research Chair in UW’s department of physics and astronomy, says Hudson is finding that much of the matter in the nearby universe moves as an ensemble with a surprisingly high speed. “If the work he and others are doing is confirmed, it will require a major revision in the way we think the universe came into being and how it evolved.”

Hudson and his colleagues have submitted a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society, and a preprint version is available here.

Sources: arXiv, University of Waterloo

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Dust Could Point Out Earth-like Exoplanets

Zodiacal light can be seen in the sky before sunrise or after sunset. Credit: Yuri Beletsky/ESO Paranal

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The current exoplanet count — the number of planets astronomers have found orbiting other stars –stands at 312. That’s a lot of planets. But not a single one of them can be classified as Earth-like. We just don’t have the ability to detect planets that small yet. But it might help if we knew exactly where to look. New research using supercomputer simulations of dusty disks around sun-like stars show that planets nearly as small as Mars can create patterns in the dust that future telescopes may be able to detect. The research points to a new avenue in the search for habitable planets. “It may be a while before we can directly image earth-like planets around other stars but, before then, we’ll be able to detect the ornate and beautiful rings they carve in interplanetary dust,” says Christopher Stark, the study’s lead researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Working with Marc Kuchner at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Stark modeled how 25,000 dust particles responded to the presence of a single planet — ranging from the mass of Mars to five times Earth’s — orbiting a sun-like star. Using NASA’s Thunderhead supercomputer at Goddard, the scientists ran 120 different simulations that varied the size of the dust particles and the planet’s mass and orbital distance.

“Our models use ten times as many particles as previous simulations. This allows us to study the contrast and shapes of ring structures,” Kuchner adds. From this data, the researchers mapped the density, brightness, and heat signature resulting from each set of parameters.

“It isn’t widely appreciated that planetary systems — including our own — contain lots of dust,” Stark adds. “We’re going to put that dust to work for us.”

Much of the dust in our solar system forms inward of Jupiter’s orbit, as comets crumble near the sun and asteroids of all sizes collide. The dust reflects sunlight and sometimes can be seen as a wedge-shaped sky glow — called the zodiacal light — before sunrise or after sunset.

Dust rings. Credit: NASA/Christopher Stark, GSFC
Dust rings. Credit: NASA/Christopher Stark, GSFC

The computer models account for the dust’s response to gravity and other forces, including the star’s light. Starlight exerts a slight drag on small particles that makes them lose orbital energy and drift closer to the star.

“The particles spiral inward and then become temporarily trapped in resonances with the planet,” Kuchner explains. A resonance occurs whenever a particle’s orbital period is a small-number ratio — such as two-thirds or five-sixths — of the planet’s.

For example, if a dust particle makes three orbits around its star every time the planet completes one, the particle repeatedly will feel an extra gravitational tug at the same point in its orbit. For a time, this extra nudge can offset the drag force from starlight and the dust can settle into subtle ring-like structures.

“The particles spiral in toward the star, get trapped in one resonance, fall out of it, spiral in some more, become trapped in another resonance, and so on,” Kuchner says. Accounting for the complex interplay of forces on tens of thousands of particles required the mathematical horsepower of a supercomputer.

Some scientists note that the presence of large amounts of dust could present an obstacle to directly imaging earthlike planets. Future space missions — such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, now under construction and scheduled for launch in 2013, and the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder — will study nearby stars with dusty disks. The models created by Stark and Kuchner give astronomers a preview of dust structures that signal the presence of otherwise hidden worlds.

“Our catalog will help others infer a planet’s mass and orbital distance, as well as the dominant particle sizes in the rings,” Stark says.

Stark and Kuchner published their results in the October 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Stark has made his atlas of exo-zodiacal dust simulations available online.

Source: Goddard Space Flight Center

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Mars Science Laboratory: Still Alive, For Now

The Mars Science Laboratory. Credit: JPL

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The Mars Science Laboratory, the next generation of Mars rovers slated to head to Mars in 2009, is still alive, for the time being. The car-sized rover designed to look for life on Mars is over budget and behind schedule due to technical problems, and NASA officials met today to discuss their options. Potentially, Congress could pull the plug on the mission if cost overruns go too high. NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and Science Associate Administrator Ed Weiler were briefed, and met with mission managers in attempt to work out a potential solution. In a press briefing today, Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA headquarters said the rover’s progress will be assessed again in January, but the mission will need more money. “This is a really important scientific mission,” McCuistion said. “This is truly the push into the next decade for the Mars program and for the discovery for the potential for life on other planets…I fully believe that Congress will support us as we go forward on this because they recognize the importance of the mission as well.”

The panel of NASA officials at the briefing wouldn’t say where the money will come from or exactly how much will be needed to keep the rover on schedule and provide the engineers the resources they need to overcome the technical problems. But NASA will seek additional money from Congress and/or realign funds from other missions.

“If we’re going to launch in 2009 or 2011 additional budget resources are going to be necessary. The sources of that we cannot release until we get approval from the Office of Management and Budget and Congress,” said McCuistion.

Costs for MSL have already gone from the initial $1.5 billion to $1.9 billion. Launch is scheduled sometime between Sept. 15 and Oct. 15, 2009, but could be delayed until 2011 if the problems take more time to be resolved. Earth and Mars come closest to each other approximately every 26 months, providing favorable launch windows.

Problems with parachutes, actuators and other materials have delayed construction of the rover, and currently the contractors are working multiple shifts to make up for lost time. Mission managers hope tests of the rover can begin in November or December.

MSL will be three times as heavy and twice the width of the Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) that landed in 2004, and will be able to travel twice as far. It will carry ten advanced scientific instruments and cameras. It will make the first precise landing and a predetermined site, using a guided entry system and a soft-landing system called the Sky Crane.

Source: NASA News Audio

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

365 Days of Astronomy Podcast

Hopefully you’ve heard about the International Year of Astronomy — a year long celebration in 2009 of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first look through the telescope. One part of that celebration is the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. There will be one podcast per day, every day, for all 365 days of 2009. The podcasts will be 5 to 10 minutes in duration, and will be available through the 365 Days of Astronomy website and an RSS feed. The 365 Days team has just put out a trailer encouraging everyone to listen every day:

Want to be part of the project?

Not only will you have the chance to listen each day, but you can participate as well. The podcast episodes will be written, recorded and produced by people around the world. Each day will have a specific topic or theme based on The 365 Days of Astronomy Calendar, a daily calendar of astronomical events, themes and ideas created by the IYA.

People participating can choose their own topics, all of which will need to be approved ahead of time. For all the details head on over to the website. And if you’ve never recorded anything before, never fear. There’s even information on how to record a podcast, as well as much more.

You can also follow 365 Days of Astronomy on Twitter.

And, if you thought you’ve heard the voice on the video before, its none other than the golden voice of Mat Kaplan from Planetary Radio.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

ExoFly: Future Space Exploration Super Hero?

Artist rendition of th ExoFly on Mars. Courtesy Ray Villard

This is perhaps the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Ray Villard, the news director for the Hubble Space Telescope, also writes a blog for Discovery called Cosmic Ray (love that name!) He recently wrote about a dragonfly-like robotic device being developed by the Technical University Delft, Wageningen University in the Netherlands. It’s call the ExoFly, and Ray described it as a “dragonfly-on-steroids … a nimble flapping aerobot.” It could be the next generation of robotic planetary explorers. It’s a small, lightweight autonomous machine capable of flying, hovering, landing and taking off like an insect. Ray says this type of vehicle would “open up a new exploration niches that it not easily reachable by rovers or airborne vehicles on far flung worlds.” Actually, it might work best in conjunction with a future big rover, flying ahead to search for interesting or dangerous terrain, and the rover would provide a “landing pad” for the ExoFly’s home base. While the ExoFly may be small, its name sounds like a potential super hero, and its capabilities could be in the exploration super hero category, as well.

Take a look at the incredible video of the ExoFly below:

The ExoFly would be great for exploring Mars, and Titan, too. Small onboard cameras would provide a unique overhead but close-up view of the terrain in geological terms that would be different from, and could compliment, a rover.

The prototype ExoFly weighs less than an ounce, has a wingspan of only a foot, and can fly for 12 minutes on batteries.

A Mars ExoFly would need a longer wingspan and carry a miniaturized high-resolution digital video camera, sensors, navigation system and instruments.

Check out all of Ray Villard’s ideas for this future flying robot at Cosmic Ray.

Image and video credit: T.E. Zegers

Source: Cosmic Ray (with a head nod to Disco Dave Mosher for his Twitter Tweet)

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Energizer-Bunny Odyssey Spacecraft Will Keep Going

Artists depiction of Odyssey at Mars. Credit: NASA

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Seems like everyone at Mars is getting an extended mission these days – every spacecraft, that is. The Mars Odyssey orbiting spacecraft, the longest-serving of six spacecraft now studying Mars, has gotten another two-year extension of its mission. And mission extensions are great opportunities to try something new, so Odyssey is altering its orbit to get a different and better look at Mars with its Thermal Emission Imaging System which maps minerals on Mars in infrared. During this third mission extension, which goes through September 2010, Odyssey will also be able to point its camera with more flexibility than ever before. Odyssey is another Energizer Bunny-like spacecraft: it has been going and going since it reached Mars in 2001.

The orbit adjustment will allow Odyssey’s Thermal Emission Imaging System to look down at sites when it’s mid-afternoon, rather than late afternoon, as it has been doing so far. The multipurpose camera will take advantage of the infrared radiation emitted by the warmer rocks to provide clues to the rocks’ identities.

“This will allow us to do much more sensitive detection and mapping of minerals,” said Odyssey Project Scientist Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena , Calif.

The mission’s orbit design before now used a compromise between what works best for the Thermal Emission Imaging System and what works best for another instrument, the Gamma Ray Spectrometer.

To change its orbit, the operations team at JPL and Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver fired Odyssey’sthrusters for nearly 6 minutes on Sept. 30, the final day of the mission’s second two-year extension.

This image from Odyssey shows a surface changed by floods. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
This image from Odyssey shows a surface changed by floods. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

“This was our biggest maneuver since 2002, and it went well,” said JPL’s Gaylon McSmith, Odyssey mission manager. “The spacecraft is in good health. The propellant supply is adequate for operating through at least 2015.”

Odyssey’s orbit a sun-synchronous polar orbit at Mars. The local solar time has been about 5 p.m. at whatever spot on Mars Odyssey flew over as it made its dozen daily passes from between the north pole region to the south pole region for the past five years. (Likewise, the local time has been about 5 a.m. under the track of the spacecraft during the south-to-north leg of each orbit.)

From last week’s thruster maneuver, that synchronization will gradually change over the next year or so. Its effect is that the time of day on the ground when Odyssey is overhead is now getting earlier by about 20 seconds per day. A follow-up maneuver, probably in late 2009 when the overpass time is between 2:30 and 3:00 p.m., will end the progression toward earlier times.

This will also allow the camera away to be pointed in different directions, instead of just the straight-down pointing that has been used throughout the mission. Doing this will allow the team to fill in some gaps in earlier mapping and also create some stereo, three-dimensional imaging.

The downside of this is one instrument will likely stop being used. The gamma ray detector, one of three instruments in Odyssey’s Gamma Ray Spectrometer suite, needs a later-hour orbit to avoid overheating of a critical component. But the neutron spectrometer and high-energy neutron detector are expected to keep operating.

The Gamma Ray Spectrometer provided dramatic discoveries of water-ice near the surface throughout much of high-latitude Mars, the impetus for NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander mission. The gamma ray detector has also mapped global distribution of many elements, such as iron, silicon and potassium, a high science priority for the first and second extensions of the Odyssey mission. A panel of planetary scientists assembled by NASA recommended this year that Odyssey make the orbit adjustment to get the best science return from the mission in coming years.

Odyssey will continue providing crucial support for Mars surface missions as well as conducting its own investigations. It has relayed to Earth nearly all data returned from NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity . It shares with NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter the relay role for Phoenix. It has made targeted observations for evaluating candidate landing sites.

Source: Odyssey home page

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Is the Impossible “Emdrive” Possible?

Proposed design for an electromagnetic drive. Credit: SPR Ltd.

A controversial concept called the electromagnetic drive, or Emdrive for short has been called impossible. But one company believes the concept is viable and has worked for several years on building demonstration models. The Emdrive is a reactionless propulsion system that supposedly generates thrust by converting electrical energy via microwaves. If it works it could provide an almost endless supply of thrust for satellites and possibly other spacecraft. But no detectable energy emanates from the device, and most scientists say the Emdrive violates the well-established principle of the conservation of momentum. Satellite Propulsion Research, Ltd. (SPR), the company working on the drive now says researchers from China have confirmed the theory behind the Emdrive, and they should have a trial engine ready to test by the end of this year.

A reactionless drive was first proposed in the 1950’s, but came to attention in 2006 when New Scientist published an article about Dr. Roger Shawyer, who founded SPR, and claimed he had constructed a prototype that produced 88 millinewtons of forces while using only 700 watts of power. The idea was met with criticism from nearly all fronts.

The idea of the Emdrive involves forces created by reflecting microwaves between opposite walls of a cavity. If a cavity could be designed which would cause the forces on one side to be greater than the other, thrust could be achieved. The proposed cavity is cone shaped, which supposedly would provide the unequal force design.

In principle, no microwaves or anything else leaves the device, and so it is considered reactionless. But Shawyers website claims that the device is not reactionless, or a perpetual motion machine, because the force is created by a “reaction between the end plates of the waveguide and the Electromagnetic wave propagated within it.”

Originally, Shawyer, a British scientist, got funding from the UK, and then from am US company. Now the researchers at China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) in Xi’an say they have confirmed the Emdrive theory, and have gotten funding to build the device.

Their device is based on Shawyer’s theories, and if it works, it would confirm what Shawyer has been claiming all along. The Chinese lead researcher, Professor Yang Juan, previously has worked with microwave plasma thrusters, which has similar engineering principles. A recent article in Wired said he Chinese should be capable of determining whether the thruster really works or whether the apparent forces are caused by experimental errors.

If the Emdrive works, what would it mean for spaceflight? Shawyer says a solar-powered Emdrive could take a manned mission to Mars in 41 days.

Paper by Shawyer on the Emdrive (not peer reviewed)
Opposing paper by Dr. John Costella

Sources: Wired, Emdrive.com, Wiki