Build missiles flying around the Earth for three seconds

An American company is researching to build the world's first antimatter engine rocket, at a rate many times faster than today's fastest spacecraft.

The world is about to have the first antimatter rocket in the world

The Voyager 1 spacecraft is the current fastest-speed flying human, about 14 km per second, capable of flying out of the solar system after a few years. However, that speed is nothing compared to the distances in the universe. Andromeda's closest galaxy is 2.5 million light-years from Earth.

"The speed of 14 km per second is really slow, considering the very long distances in the universe," Ryan Weed said at the 2015 Wired Conference on October 16. He is the co-founder and CEO of Positron Dynamics, a California-based company and is associated with many other aerospace companies such as SpaceX and the US Aerospace Agency (NASA). "We need a much better missile, a superior way to fly out into space."

Energy from antimatter is obtained from a process called "annihilation" . This is a unique property of antimatter: when antimatter and matter collide, they cancel each other out and produce pure energy. This is the most direct conversion of matter into energy.

Current missile technology is quite limited.(Artwork: Reuters).

In order to easily imagine the power of antimatter engines, Weed for example if you had 20 salt particles and 20 " antimatter " particles collided, the energy generated would be equivalent to more than 1,800 tons of fuel. whether conventional missiles, or the equivalent of energy that the entire city of London uses for a day.

With antimatter engines, missiles can fly around the Earth for three seconds, to Mars for several weeks, to Pluto for several months and to Alpha Centauri star systems for about 40 years. At the speed of Voyager 1, it took 30,000 years to reach this star system.

However, current technology has not allowed to exploit this fuel source. The positron particles, antimatter of electrons intended to be used, still exist only at very high temperatures, unmanageable.

"With current technology, only one out of every 1,000 positrons can be exploited to generate energy, the efficiency is too low," Weed explained. To solve this problem, Weed and his team sent a patent on a system of "cooling positrons using a magnetic field combined with semiconductors".

The company's immediate goal is to build a shoe-sized satellite, using an anti-launcher engine to orbit. If successful, the project not only serves the future of astronautics, but can also significantly reduce the cost of launching satellites on low orbits of technology companies such as Google and Samsung. Samsung is planning to launch 5,000 satellites to create a global broadband network.