12 votes
Accepted

Can we hit speed of light using Antimatter?

No. Accelerating mass to the speed of light requires infinite energy. A matter-antimatter reaction releases a huge amount of energy, but $huge \neq \infty$, not even close. On the other hand, if you ...
Jörg W Mittag's user avatar
9 votes
Accepted

What kind of antimatter engine is this?

It's a "beam core" engine, described in some further detail on Project Rho's Big List O' Engines: Microscopic amounts of antimatter are reacted with equal amounts of matter. Remember: ...
Russell Borogove's user avatar
8 votes
Accepted

What is our ability to capture or reflect photons with a wavelength of $2.5×10^{-12}$ meters?

Electromagnetic radiation with frequencies above $10^{19}Hz$ are conventionally called Gamma Rays. Gamma rays will penetrate instead of reflect of most materials. Reflection is only possible at very ...
hdhondt's user avatar
  • 1,194
7 votes

What is our ability to capture or reflect photons with a wavelength of $2.5×10^{-12}$ meters?

The wavelength you mention corresponds to about 510 KeV. As hdhondt says, conventional optics, such as a parabolic mirror, don't work at this range. Wolter telescopes use grazing incidence ...
Vince 49's user avatar
  • 2,611
7 votes

What color would the exhaust of an antimatter rocket be?

As noted in the comments - there may be nothing to see. If your magic antimatter rocket is just slapping matter and anti matter together and defeating physics to get all the resulting products ...
GremlinWranger's user avatar
6 votes

Solid Core Antimatter Engines: Do they have a point?

To make it clear what is being discussed is the blob labeled "Nuclear, antimatter, laser (H2)" in the graph below. The blob in question has a specific impulse of 800 to 1000 seconds and a ...
David Hammen's user avatar
  • 74.6k
6 votes
Accepted

Is antimatter feasable?

They are on to something... else than they try to claim on their site. The paper on the actual science explains the concepts. This is not intended to be the "holy grail", genuine antimatter drive (a ...
SF.'s user avatar
  • 55k
5 votes

What kind of antimatter engine is this?

It's difficult to say exactly what type of engine this is as Anti-matter engines are solely conceptual. Mainly due to the highest production available for Anti-Hydrogen seems to be about 1 gram per ...
Adriano's user avatar
  • 59
4 votes

Is antimatter feasable?

As written, this question is far too broad. "Are they on to something?" is a nearly meaningless question. Is antimatter propulsion theoretically feasible? Yes. Does it make interstellar travel ...
Russell Borogove's user avatar
3 votes

In Zero G, can excess heat be used propel a spaceship forward?

It really depends on a few factors. Just having heat does not do anything. In order to get an object to move you got to have some force. So in theory if you radiated the heat away or if you had so ...
User1's user avatar
  • 113
3 votes

In Zero G, can excess heat be used propel a spaceship forward?

You can always stick a heat engine between the source of the heat and the radiator dumping the heat into space, but that will make the heat source hotter and reduce the amount of heat you can radiate ...
Christopher James Huff's user avatar
3 votes

What is our ability to capture or reflect photons with a wavelength of $2.5×10^{-12}$ meters?

As the other answers state, there's not much we can do to reflect or otherwise redirect these gamma rays. However, there is one thing we can do: Blackbody radiation. If the gamma rays hit an object ...
ikrase's user avatar
  • 8,874
2 votes

In Zero G, can excess heat be used propel a spaceship forward?

In rocketry you always have to take mass into account. Lots and lots of very cool ideas of how one could use otherwise wasted energy die on the vine for the simple reason the machinery required to ...
SF.'s user avatar
  • 55k
2 votes
Accepted

Recent advances in anti-matter generation

There are proposed thermal antimatter rocket designs which could work with positrons. I am focusing on these to answer your questions (in reverse order): The amount of energy generated is (more or ...
choeger's user avatar
  • 2,443
2 votes

Solid Core Antimatter Engines: Do they have a point?

TL;DR: solid core antimatter rockets basically are the same as solid-core nuclear thermal rockets, which is why they have pretty similar performance figures. Here's a diagram from Antimatter ...
Starfish Prime's user avatar
2 votes

Antimatter fuel compartment

It's bad when matter and anti-matter come in direct contact[reference needed]. Currently, the only way to store antimatter is to trap it inside some very strong magnetic fields. In short, the size ...
Dan Pichelman's user avatar
1 vote

Science Contest Topic (space exploration)

^ Propulsion is too broad to cover in 3 minutes. Picking a specific process or system in propulsion (such as injectors) may be a possibility but, now you're running with a topic that is seemingly ...
urbiggestburden's user avatar
1 vote

What would be the dangers of matter/antimatter annihilation propulsion, and what can be done about them?

This is essentially an engineering question. Dangers, or risks as you'd typically call them in engineering, have two aspects: probability and outcome. Something can be a high risk because of a high ...
MSalters's user avatar
  • 1,644
1 vote

Antimatter fuel compartment

An anti-matter engine could potentially be very efficient, as you have mentioned it is extremely energy efficient for its mass. The tradeoff, however, is that you need a lot larger engine to contain ...
PearsonArtPhoto's user avatar
  • 121k

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