The electromagnetic propulsion engine which many scientists are excited about and believe that it will bring in a new, exciting era of space travel has been an regular topic in the last year, mostly because even though it defies our known laws of physics, the current experiments show it to work, even after eliminating errors.
The drive has been tested for over a year now, and NASA scientists had previously concluded that it was “producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon.” Since then, there were mixed reports of the drive not working, or that the research had been left behind, however NASA have recently released an official update on the drive testing, revealing it does work – regardless of the fact that they cannot properly explain the reasons behind it.
“I will tell you that we first built and installed a second generation, closed face magnetic damper that reduced the stray magnetic fields in the vacuum chamber by at least an order of magnitude and any Lorentz force interactions it could produce,” said NASA’s Paul March. “And yet the anomalous thrust signals remain.”
The drive creates thrust by bouncing microwaves in an enclosed chamber, and uses solar power. If the drive gets to a point where it is functional and practical to our methods of space travel, it could see the trip from Earth to Mars done in around 10 weeks, which is amazing.
