Antimatter Propulsion - Ryan Weed, CEO of Positron Dynamics

[Music] you know I usually don't start these talks with a graph or a plot of data it's not that exciting but I'll make an exception here because a couple months ago a group of scientists astronomers from all around the world published in nature magazine something groundbreaking and it was this graph I know it looks kind of like a jumble of plots of data but it shows a wobble and what was that wobble well turns out that all of these data plots are looking at the exact position of a star our closest star that's Proxima Centauri it's about 44 light years away which is still pretty far 35 million million kilometers but still it's pretty close in galactic terms and they're looking at the exact position of That star because they had a feeling that there might be a planet next to it so this wobble that you see there on the graph is the actual star moving because of the gravitational pull of a very small planet orbiting right around it and based on the period or the or the width of that wobble and the amplitude of that while what we can infer that there is in fact a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri it turns out that this planet is in the habitable zone which means there could be liquid water and there could be life there it's kind of lucky that our closest star turns out to have a planet that might have life so that gives us the idea of we should we should go there right we should go and see what's there and there's a problem with that and that are traditional Rockets which originally were developed in the 1920s the technology hasn't changed significantly since then Robert Goddard there on the Left developed liquid propulsion in 1924 and then 50 year later we launched on the right Voyager 1 that's the fastest human or man-made object that we've ever created now it goes about 15 kilometers per second I'll just imagine that speed going 15 kilometers every second now it seems pretty fast but unfortunately in terms of distances in space it's pretty slow if you want to get to Mars it would take you months and you know there are several people trying to do that now Elon Musk for example NASA if you want to go to outer solar system which NASA just did took them 10 years to get there and a billion dollars 150 million kilometers away take you years to get to get there with current technology but the real the real problem is that if you want to get outside of our solar system to that closest star system Alpha Centauri it'll take you thirty thousand years to get there I don't want to wait around that long I want to go there sooner so we have to figure out a way to get there sooner you know it turns out that we're actually humans are actually very good at developing exploration tools ways of getting us to places we've never been before we harness the power of wind we were able to measure the position of the stars and the Sun very accurately we were able to measure time very accurately this allowed us to sail the seas and explore and allowed for the golden age of exploration we were able to harness the power of chemical energy combustion aerodynamics we mastered the skies but if we really want to go beyond that outside of our solar system we need to find a new technology when able we need to be able to harness that new technology to get to our closest stars in a human lifetime so I'll look at a couple different options here there are a lot of very smart people working on this there are some options in terms of what technology we can we can harness to get outside of our solar system whether it be nuclear fusion laser propulsion or my field which is antimatter so this is project Icarus it's a very large fusion rocket based on fusing together very light light isotopes of hydrogen to create nuclear energy the only problem with this is that you need a very massive initial amount of energy to catalyze that reaction it's so it turns out you know I have the Eiffel Tower there and then next to that the Saturn 5 rocket which actually allowed us to get to the moon it's a huge project requires a lot of investment and also in Urschel confinement fusion has yet to be demonstrated in the lab so this is challenging but still a pretty cool project the other option laser propulsion recently there's been a project called the breakthrough initiatives that have looked into using a very powerful set of lasers to accelerate a very small sort of coffee-table sized mirror very high velocities you know this would work you need you need about 10 gigawatts of power you need that's about the same amount of power as 10 nuclear power plants by the way so it's very challenging but still the physics is there for this to happen now you know my background is an antimatter so let's talk about antimatter right what is it so a lot of people think that antimatter is theoretical it hasn't been discovered yet so it's actually been around since the 1920s Paul Dirac who was a famous physicist quantum physicist was working on combining special relativity Einstein's theories with quantum mechanics so we solved this equation for the relativistic quantum mechanics of energy of a particle and he came out with positive and negative energy solutions and he said wait a minute maybe the negative energy solutions are a whole new class of particles of course everyone thought he was a little crazy just because he came out with a negative solution to this equation and he's saying oh that's a whole new class of particles but a few year later at Caltech call Anderson saw this it's actually a track for a part of a particle a high-energy particle going through a cloud chamber and it's actually curving the wrong way in a magnetic field so Carl saw this and he knew about Dirac's result and he said wait a minute this could be antimatter this could be the mirror type matter that fall Dirac predicted so that was 1932 and so antimatter has been around since then annihilation it's the most important thing about antimatter so when you have an antimatter particle and you have another matter particle and they come close enough together there is a probability that both particles will disappear and form pure energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation so what does that mean in terms of applications so it means if you have a clump of antimatter it has a very high energy density in order to put that into more familiar terms say you had a hundred grains of antimatter salt at 19 mega joules for microgram it's the highest energy density of any any substance in the universe 100 grains of that would have the same amount of energy as all the rocket fuel on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket so you can see how a little bit of antimatter packs a pretty big punch that's what originally got me interested in antimatter as an undergrad and what it still interest me today about it so what was the original concept of antimatter propulsion you know and back in the 1950s we had known about antimatter and a scientist from Germany called Eugene Sanger came up with this idea of an antimatter rocket the idea was that you'd produce enough antimatter store it in your rocket annihilate it with corresponding matter and then direct that energy in the direction of your rocket nozzle so that you can have propulsion there's a couple problems with this and these are the reasons that we don't have antimatter Rockets right now is that one you can't produce enough antimatter for this to be realistic secondly you can't trap it antimatter as soon as it touches matter will annihilate so you can't use normal matter to trap antimatter the other problem is that when you annihilate antimatter it forms very high-energy radiation which is very difficult to direct with normal matter so those are some challenges that we faced in developing an antimatter propulsion concept so I thought about these problems finishing up my PhD and in 2011 and we came up with a couple a couple of reasons why antimatter propulsion wasn't feasible at the time one of them is called moderation moderation is the process of going from hot to cold and in antimatter physics that process is traditionally very inefficient so the state of the art in 2011 was to take your hot antimatter antimatter when it's created is created at a million times hotter than the surface of the Sun very difficult to control so what you did back then was you run it through a very thin layer of metal and you're just hoping that one part one of these positrons will diffuse through that metal and reach the surface of course a lot of them hit an electron on the way and you lose it to annihilation but about one in a thousand made it through so the process of moderation was about you lose 999 out of a thousandth of 0.1 percent efficient so we were thinking of ways of making this process better and we came up with a little sketch an idea put it down on paper that turned into a patent we applied for some funding and got some funny to try it out and then a couple years ago we found that the concept for our positron moderator actually works we sort of incorporated that into a more remastered producible design and so this little positron moderator is the sort of the heart of any of our positron propulsion concepts so building a team with that asked some friends hey you guys want to stop working on chemical rockets and maybe bill an antimatter rocket company of course they said yes started out in a little office building with some equipment and our initial funding quickly found out that you can't do nuclear physics in an office building we got kicked out and then found a little more appropriate facilities and actually in a old nuclear fallout shelter a couple years ago so the idea is to integrate some of this into what's called a CubeSat to demonstrate the technology cube SATs are modular small satellite that are easily launch Apple so how do we overcome those three problems that I talked about well the first to production of antimatter and trapping of antimatter we overcome that by using a radioisotope which is a middle of positrons constantly emitting positrons over its lifetime we run that through a positive or positron moderator which in turn produces a very high intensity called positron source so rather than using energy onboard a spacecraft to generate antimatter or using energy to trap antimatter we combine those two processes into one and finally in order to direct the antimatter we can't direct gamma rays which we get from annihilation but the energy from the gamma rays can be converted to a charged particle via nuclear reaction so we then have a very energetic charged particle which is the perfect recipe for producing a rocket because magnetic fields are actually very good at directing charged particles so what does it mean for performance of a rocket so the exit velocity of these charged particles about a thousand times faster than in a chemical rocket moving at about 10% the speed of light that means you can develop a rocket that would propel something thousand times faster than traditional chemical rockets that means going to Mars and weeks Pluto or outer solar system in months or if you wanted to go to Alpha Centauri you could get there in about four years which is less than a human lifetime now you can't really develop a business plan based on going to Alpha Centauri it's very difficult to convince investors to give you money for that but what you can't do is develop a very efficient propulsion mechanism for things in low-earth orbit we know over the next 10 years there's a lot of companies planning to launch constellations of satellites of a thousand or more satellites into low-earth orbit for the purposes of earth imaging broadband internet so this is where we're really looking at to add our capability to to these low Earth orbit constellations of satellites which you know they need to be able to maneuver and our our system will allow them to do that a little bit further down the road several government agencies SpaceX some private companies are planning to go to nearby planets Mars and then a little bit further down the road in ten years or so you have companies like Planetary Resources a company that wants to go out in the asteroid belt and mine actual asteroids for things like water spacecraft fuel rich elements like platinum so that's that's our our business side of things so you know I always like to come back to why do we want to explore space because that's what I'm interested in you know I think it really the real question is not why we explore space because they're you know they're been plenty of technologies that have come out of the space race but the more fundamental question is why do we explore in the first place and I think it's part of our as part of who we are as humanity in humanity I think it's part of our DNA to wanting to challenge ourselves to want to go to places we've never been before so I think we can't change that and and to deny that would be wrong so with this new revelation that there is a earth-like planet orbiting the closest star that is the catalyst for the new space race and I'm happy to be part of it so thank you very much guys [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Hello Tomorrow

Views: 1,017,812

Rating: 4.6795392 out of 5

Keywords: space travel, antimatter, positron, Positron Dynamics, Hello Tomorrow, space exploration, space, interstellar, satellite, spacecraft, spaceship

Id: n2pWv-D84W0

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2016