First continuous room-temperature solid-state MASER

[AaronT]

Diamond Solid State MASER

Detailed Technical Article in Nature

My first thought was application in propellantless RF Cavity thrusters. Since they require very finely tuned microwaves to produce the thrust effect...

 

[Alaskan]

Yes, microwave thrusters are certainly interesting, a slow but constant acceleration becomes a huge amount of speed over time without carrying huge amounts of fuel, I wonder if these are efficient enough to be used that way, or whether a magnetron would be more bang for the buck of input power.

 

[Benm]

Why would you need a maser to make a microwave thrust system?

Anything that converts electricity to microwaves at decent efficiency and with a directional output would function just fine... including the magnetron tube in your microwave oven if you connect a small horn output coupler to it.

Essentially the wavelength doesn't really matter though, only the efficiency from electrical to RF/light/etc output. In that regard laser diodes would even make very decent candidates for such a propellant system... though a halogen lightbulb would probably work even better as long as you use a reflector that also reflects the IR.

So yes, you can accelerate spacecraft by mounting car headlights on the rear ends... as long as you're not in a hurry.

 

[Alaskan]

This is the system I believe he was thinking about when remarking if the technology could be applied to a microwave drive:

Emdrive Latest News: What is Emdrive Thruster Technology, and Can It Really Work? ? DoonWire

My first thoughts are using a conventional microwave source is probably more suited.

 

[diachi]

This is the system I believe he was thinking about when remarking if the technology could be applied to a microwave drive:

Emdrive Latest News: What is Emdrive Thruster Technology, and Can It Really Work? ? DoonWire

My first thoughts are using a conventional microwave source is probably more suited.

Weird, I was just thinking about the EM drive the other day. Wondering how the research on that is progressing. It would be a game changer if it turns out that it actually works.

 

[paul1598419]

IDK, I still think this is some imagination's wet dream. There are always predictions of what can be achieved, but it never pans out. Now the Chinese are supposed to be trying this out. Meh.

 

[Benm]

Weird, I was just thinking about the EM drive the other day. Wondering how the research on that is progressing. It would be a game changer if it turns out that it actually works.

Yeah, a game changer that'd throw out the standard model completely in one go.

I don't see how that thing could ever work, unless it's simply just leaking more radiation from one end than the other which would produce thrust.

Then again that would be less that what you achieve by simply mounting a magnetron and waveguide on the back end of a spacecraft and firing that up. If the concept is to be proven, they'd have to demonstrate that it produces -more- thrust per watt than just firing microwaves straight out the back.

Not that such drive systems would be useless per se... the downside is you get very little thrust for your power, but the upside is that no matter is being emitted and it could be operated indefinitely, without fuel, as long has you have power.

 

[RedCowboy]

Ion drives work by acceleration ions, thus converting electricity to kinetic, but a photon drive ? I don't think there is any actual push from a photon only emitter.