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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
G. H. Miley, J. Nadler, T. Hochberg, Y. Gu, O. Barnouin, J. Lovberg
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 840-845
Advanced Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-3
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inertial-Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) is currently undergoing renewed experimental and theoretical study as a fusion reactor scheme that can burn advanced fuels such as D-3He and p-11B. The goal of the IEC approach is the confinement of plasma inside multiple nested spherical potential wells. These wells are created by injecting ions into a highly transparent, high voltage (5 – 50 kV) spherical cathode. Multiple passes of ions through the center create a high density non-Maxwellian core. An IEC device can produce intense beam-background (ion-neutral) and beam-beam (ion-ion) fusion reactions with or without the formation of a “Poissor” structure (multiple well). Two different approaches for injecting ions are also under study: ion guns and ionization of background gas. The initial experimental results presented here are taken in the non-Poissor beam-background mode as a precursor to experimentation in the more complex beam-beam and Poissor modes.