Source: Discovery News
If tests prove successful, this innovative new rocket could one day take astronauts to Mars in a little more than a month.
THE GIST
- NASA is looking at flying a plasma-powered rocket to survey an asteroid.
- The rocket is a twin of one being developed for testing aboard the International Space Station.
- This new rocket could shorten the time it takes to get to destinations in our solar system.
An innovative plasma rocket being built as a spare for one heading to the International Space Station may have a space mission of its own: visiting an asteroid.
Equipped with an electric propulsion system, the rocket, known as Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR), is being developed to one day transport astronauts to Mars in 39 to 45 days — a fraction of the six to nine months the trip would take with conventional chemical rockets. Shorter travel time greatly reduces astronauts’ exposure to potentially deadly cosmic and solar radiation, currently a show-stopper for human missions to Mars.
Setting sail for an asteroid would be a powerful demonstration of VASIMR technology, which uses radio waves to ionize propellant — such as argon, xenon or hydrogen — and heat the resulting plasma to temperatures 20 times hotter than the surface of the sun. In place of metal nozzles to control the direction of the exhaust, VASIMR uses magnetic fields.
“All of a sudden, the future is here,” said VASIMR inventor and physicist Franklin Chang-Diaz, a seven-time shuttle flier who left NASA in 2005 to start a company and work full time developing the rocket.
To read more: http://news.discovery.com/space/plasma-rocket-asteroid-mission.html