NASA's HERTS E-Sail Propulsion System To Speed-Up Space Travel

NASA's new propulsion technology, named Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System Electric Sail or HERTS E-Sail is all set to revolutionize space travel. The system, specifically aimed to accommodate long-distance missions, is currently under study in Alabama. Why this system is revolutionary is because it significantly cuts down on the travel time (by almost two-thrids) taken by a spacecraft to enter interstellar space, and while its main objective remains speeding up the spaceship's arrival at the heliopause, it may even be employed to better promptness of missions confined just to our mother planet.


The HERTS E-Sail technology makes use of the solar wind, a stream of high-energy charged particles (protons and electrons) coming out from the sun, attaining speeds as high as 900 kilometers per second and maximum temperature of 1 million degree Celsius. In order to harness this kind of energy, the spaceship would be equipped with at least 10 electrically charged aluminum wires coming outwards in circular motion, where each wire will be just a millimeter in diameter but 20 kilometers in length.

The spacecraft would then complete one rotation every single hour, and the centrifugal force generated at this rate would gradually bring the wires to position. Once this is set, the ship's navigation shall be manoeuvred by altering the voltage running through each wire, thus altering electrostatic contact with the protons running in the solar wind, thus causing a momentum exchange that will push the spacecraft faster into space.

The tests that NASA is running in Alabama are basically to analyse the rate of collisions between the wire and the charged particles. At present, it takes a long time to reach the edge of our solar system. NASA's Voyager 1 had taken 35 years to reach heliospace, and with the E-Sail technology NASA's hoping to bring down the time count to just 10 years.