ALBUFEIRA

If the tests of the Cannae Drive technology hold up, a trip to Mars could take weeks instead of months

(Carl Franzen – The Verge)

(Cannae Drive – cannae.com)

NASA has been testing new space travel technologies throughout its entire history, but the results of its latest experiment may be the most exciting yet — if they hold up. Earlier this week at a conference in Cleveland, Ohio, scientists with NASA's Eagleworks Laboratories in Houston, Texas, presented a paper indicating they had achieved a small amount of thrust from a container that had no traditional fuels, only microwaves, bouncing around inside it. If the results can be replicated reliably and scaled up — and that's a big "if," since NASA only produced them on a very small scale over a two-day period — they could ultimately result in ultra-light weight, ultra fast spacecraft that could carry humans to Mars in weeks instead of months, and to the nearest star system outside our own (Proxima Centurai) in just about 30 years.

The type of container NASA tested was based on a model for a new space engine that doesn't use weighty liquid propellant or nuclear reactors, called a Cannae Drive. The idea is that microwaves bouncing from end-to-end of a specially designed, unevenly-shaped container can create a difference in radiation pressure, causing thrust to be exerted toward the larger end of the container. A similar type of technology called an EmDrive has been demonstrated to work in small scale trials by Chinese and Argentine scientists.

While the amount of thrust generated in these NASA's tests was lower than previous trials — between 30 and 50 micronewtons, way less than even the weight of an iPhone, as Nova points out — the fact that any thrust whatsoever is generated without an onboard source of fuel seems to violate the conservation of momentum, a bedrock in the laws of physics.

Most impressively, the NASA team specifically built two Cannae Drives, including one that was designed to fail, and instead it worked. As the scientists write in their paper abstract: "thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust." That suggests the drive is "producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon," the scientists write. It may instead be interacting with the quantum vacuum — the lowest energetic state possible — but the scientists don't have much evidence to support this idea yet.

There are many reasons to be skeptical: the inventor of the Cannae Drive, Guido Fetta, has only a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemical Engineering and is operating his company Cannae as a for-profit venture. Still, the fact that such results were produced by NASA scientists is promising and should warrant further investigation.

(source: NASA – image: The Verge/Cannae Drive)

We are sniffing methane

(The Watchers)

Vast methane plumes discovered escaping from the seafloor of Arctic ocean

Methane bubbles

Just a week into the methane sampling program and SWERUS-C3 Arctic expedition scientists have discovered vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor of the Laptev continental slope. These early glimpses of what may be in store for a warming Arctic Ocean could help scientists project the future releases of the strong greenhouse gas methane from the Arctic ocean, their press release states.

Results of preliminary analyses of seawater samples pointed towards levels of dissolved methane 10–50 times higher than background levels.

We are sniffing methane

All analysis tells the signs

We are in a Mega flare

We see it in the water column we read it above the surface and we follow it up high into the sky with radars and lasers

We see it mixed in the air and carried away with the winds.

Methane in the air

(Ulf Hedman, Science Coordinator, Swedish Polar Research Secretariat)

The discovery was made while the icebreaker Oden crosscut the Laptev Sea along a depth gradient from 1000 m to just 100 m following the continental slope upward to reach the shallow waters of the outer Laptev Sea Shelf.

By use of acoustic techniques and geochemical analyses of water samples, the scientists found vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor at depths between 500 m and 150 m. At several places, the methane “bubbles“ even rose to the ocean surface.

(texto/parcial e imagens – The Watchers)