The Ion Drive - Get to Mars within 5 hours. Is this the future of space propulsion?

What do you know about these?

Basically, take an atom and zap it to remove it's electron. Then the atom has a positive charge. Use a positive electric field to fire the atom out the back (positive charges repel each other). Since it is a little atom, you can fire it at a VERY VERY high speed.

It is like propelling your car by shooting BBs out the back. Basically, it takes a long time to get up to speed, but it much more efficient since you can shoot those BBs out at close to light speed. For the same mass of propellant, you end up going a lot further and faster(EVENTUALLY!).

Think of it this way. If you have 100 pounds of propellant and shoot it all out the back at 50,000 mph and have used it up in a few minutes (like a rocket) vs. taking that 100 pounds and shooting it out at the speed of light (though it takes you a month to shoot it all out) then you've imparted a lot more thrust overall at the end of a month.

If you wanted to go faster at the start, you need a whole mess of BB shooters going all at once. So in order to get to Mars fast, you need to design something that can shoot out more than 1 BB at a time. If you could, for example, take that 100 lbs and shoot it all out the back at the speed of light in a few minutes, you'll be really haulin'.

Current ION thrusters only shoot a few atoms out at a time, so they have been used on long missions that are weight constrained and so can't carry lots of fuel. NASA's Deep Space 1 probe (launched in 1998) was the first to test out using one.

NASA's DAWN probe that is about to reach the asteroid Vesta also uses ION engines.

[link to www.space.com]

So, the hope is that now that ion engines have been proven, that they can make much bigger ones (or hundreds/thousands of them) on a ship. We have a long way to go still, so some ideas are to use ion engines for delivering cargo/supplies and old fashioned rockets for people."


[link to www.universetoday.com]
[link to www.amazon.com]

Edit to update:

Apparently, according to the scientists on the show, they said 39 days so more like 6 weeks.

It assumes an ion drive has a nuclear power plant on board for all the power needed.

The ion engine design is assumed to be the VASIMR drive, which uses superconducting magnets to generate powerful magnetic fields to accelerate the ions. Someone mentioned this VASIMR drive earlier in the thread:

Here is a nice article on it->

"Vasimr Trumps Star Trek Ion Drive Aiming At Mars"

[link to www.dailygalaxy.com]
star-trek-ion-drive-aiming-at-mars.html