Pennsylvania State University proposed this interstellar precursor mission called ICAN 2. The foundation of technologies Pennsylvania State is researching and designing may make this proposed mission a reality within twenty years.
Pennsylvania State University proposed this interstellar precursor mission called ICAN 2. The foundation of technologies Pennsylvania State is researching and designing may make this proposed mission a reality within twenty years.
By Eric Storm
(03/28/01) Dr. Robert Frisbee, a graduate in Chemistry and a forward-looking NASA scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, notes how science fiction producers portrayed missions to the moon in 1957 and how stunned he was to see those missions portrayed in real life in 1969 by the Apollo Moon missions. Dr. Frisbee was originally an expert in solid propellant when NASA hired him in 1979, but then in 1981 NASA called together a group of scientists, including Dr. Frisbee; to start looking into more advanced propulsion technologies. This was partly due to the fact that for many years technology had not advanced to a next level and also due to the awesome distances the Voyager spacecraft were traveling in their long-term pursuit of the Jovian planets and beyond. Powered by hydrazine propellant these were the fastest spacecraft ever produced by humans, but would still take tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest solar systems and they were not even headed in that direction.
In 1997 Daniel Goldin requested a mission study of a rendezvous to the nearest stars at 10% to 50% the speed of light. This rendezvous would require an acceleration phase and deceleration phase in turn requiring four stages, two to speed up and two to slow down. Out of all the fuels which have been studied only one seemed to fit the equation and that was antimatter. A major speed bump to this equation is where to extract all this antimatter. Antimatter is the most expensive substance known to mankind, but it is also the most powerful. In 1997 Pennsylvania State University road-mapped two interstellar missions and designed a Penning trap, an electromagnetic containment device to store antiprotons (antimatter) collected from super colliders like Fermi Lab in the US and CERN in Europe for extended periods of time. The trap built by Pennsylvania State (Mark 1) can store one million antiprotons for days and even weeks, demonstrating the technology exists to store antimatter for the required time to propel spacecraft within the solar system. Cont . . .1 2
