Spacecraft Design Could Get to Titan in Only 2 Years Using a Direct Fusion Drive
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:
Spacecraft design could get to Titan in only 2 years using a direct fusion drive:
The concept fusion drive, called a direct fusion drive (or DFD), is in development at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). Scientists and Engineers there, led by Dr. Samuel Cohen, are currently working on the second iteration of it, known as the Princeton field reversed configuration-2 (PFRC-2). Eventually, the system's developers hope to launch it into space to test, and eventually become the primary drive system of spacecraft traveling throughout the solar system.
There's already one particularly interesting target in the outer solar system that is similar to Earth in many ways-Titan. Its liquid cycles and potential to harbor life have fascinated scientists since they first started collecting data on it. And if we properly used the DFD, we could send a probe there in a little under two years, according to research done by a team of aerospace engineers at the Physics Department of the New York City College of Technology, led by Professor Roman Kezerashvili and joined by two fellows from the Politecnico di Torino in Italy-Paolo Aime and Marco Gajeri.
[...] Cassini, the last famous mission to visit the Saturnian system, used a series of gravity assists between Venus and Earth to reach its destination, a journey which took almost seven years. One important thing to note, says Marco Gajeri, the paper's corresponding author, is that the window that makes these short-trip durations the most efficient opens up around 2046. While not quite 30 years from now, it does give the team at PPPL a lot more time to improve upon their current design.
More information:
Trajectory design for a Titan mission using the Direct Fusion Drive: webthesis.biblio.polito.it/15184/1/tesi.pdf
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