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Madness!
The Paper
This was the source that first alerted me to the paper's release:
"In case you've missed the hype, the EM Drive, or Electromagnetic Drive, is a propulsion system first proposed by British inventor Roger Shawyer back in 1999.
Instead of using heavy, inefficient rocket fuel, it bounces microwaves back and forth inside a cone-shaped metal cavity to generate thrust.
According to Shawyer's calculations, the EM Drive could be so efficient that it could power us to Mars in just 70 days.
But, there's a not-small problem with the system. It defies Newton's third law, which states that everything must have an equal and opposite reaction.
According to the law, for a system to produce thrust, it has to push something out the other way. The EM Drive doesn't do this.
Yet in test after test it continues to work. Last year, NASA's Eagleworks Laboratory team got their hands on an EM Drive to try to figure out once and for all what was going on.
And now we finally have those results."
The Conclusion:
"A vacuum test campaign that used an updated integrated test article and optimized torsion pendulum layout was completed. The test campaign consisted of a forward thrust element that included performing testing at ambient pressure to establish and confirm good tuning, as well as subsequent power scans at 40, 60, and 80 W, with three thrust runs performed at each power setting for a total of nine runs at vacuum. The test campaign consisted of a reverse thrust element that mirrored the forward thrust element. The test campaign included a null thrust test effort of three tests performed at vacuum at 80 W to try and identify any mundane sources of impulsive thrust; none were identified. Thrust data from forward, reverse, and null suggested that the system was consistently performing at 1.2±0.1 mN/kW1.2±0.1 mN/kW, which was very close to the average impulsive performance measured in air. A number of error sources were considered and discussed. Although thermal shift was addressed to a degree with this test campaign, future testing efforts should seek to develop testing approaches that are immune to CG shifts from thermal expansion. As indicated in Sec. II.C.8, a modified Cavendish balance approach could be employed to definitively rule out thermal. Although this test campaign was not focused on optimizing performance and was more an exercise in existence proof, it is still useful to put the observed thrust-to-power figure of 1.2 mN/kW1.2 mN/kW in context. The current state-of–the-art thrust to power for a Hall thruster is on the order of 60 mN/kW60 mN/kW. This is an order of magnitude higher than the test article evaluated during the course of this vacuum campaign; however, for missions with very large delta-v requirements, having a propellant consumption rate of zero could offset the higher power requirements. The 1.2 mN/kW1.2 mN/kW performance parameter is over two orders of magnitude higher than other forms of “zero-propellant” propulsion, such as light sails, laser propulsion, and photon rockets having thrust-to-power levels in the 3.33–6.67 μN/kW3.33–6.67 μN/kW (or 0.0033–0.0067 mN/kW0.0033–0.0067 mN/kW) range.
Read More: http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/1.B36120"
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Originally Posted by Advice Trinity by Knoxville
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