Magnetic sail

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A magnetic sail is a proposed method of spacecraft propulsion where an onboard magnetic field source interacts with a plasma wind (e.g., the solar wind) to form an artificial magnetosphere (similar to Earth's magnetosphere) that acts as a sail, transferring force from the wind to the spacecraft requiring little to no propellant as detailed for each proposed magnetic sail design in this article.

The animation and the following text summarize the magnetic sail physical principles involved. The spacecraft's magnetic field source, represented by the purple dot, generates a magnetic field, shown as expanding black circles. Under conditions summarized in the overview section, this field creates a magnetosphere whose leading edge is a magnetopause and a bow shock composed of charged particles captured from the wind by the magnetic field, as shown in blue, which deflects subsequent charged particles from the plasma wind coming from the left.

Specific attributes of the artificial magnetosphere around the spacecraft for a specific design significantly affect performance as summarized in the overview section. A magnetohydrodynamic model (verified by computer simulations and laboratory experiments) predicts that the interaction of the artificial magnetosphere with the oncoming plasma wind creates an effective sail blocking area that transfers force as shown by a sequence of labeled arrows from the plasma wind, to the spacecraft's magnetic field, to the spacecraft's field source, which accelerates the spacecraft in the same direction as the plasma wind.^[1][2]

These concepts apply to all proposed magnetic sail system designs, with the difference how the design generates the magnetic field and how efficiently the field source creates the artificial magnetosphere described above. The History of concept section summarizes key aspects of the proposed designs and relationships between them as background. The cited references are technical with many equations and in order to make the information more accessible, this article first describes in text (and illustrations where available) beginning in the overview section and prior to each design, section or groups of equations and plots intended for the technically oriented reader. The beginning of each proposed design section also contains a summary of the important aspects so that a reader can skip the equations for that design. The differences in the designs determine performance measures, such as the mass of the field source and necessary power, which in turn determine force, mass and hence acceleration and velocity that enable a performance comparison between magnetic sail designs at the end of this article. A comparison with other spacecraft propulsion methods includes some magnetic sail designs where the reader can click on the column headers to compare magnetic sail performance with other propulsion methods. The following observations result from this comparison: magnetic sail designs have insufficient thrust to launch from Earth, thrust (drag) for deceleration for the magsail in the interstellar medium is relatively large, and both the magsail and magnetoplasma sail both have significant thrust for travel away from Earth using the force from the solar wind.