There are a few hundred such groups, known as tokamaks, in government-sponsored research centers around the world, including European Torus Alliance in the United Kingdom, and ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a coalition of 35 countries in the south of France. For many years, researchers have been using this technology to address the problem of nuclear disarmament, a highly flexible technology that can provide unlimited energy. Inside the tokamak, strong magnets are used to hold water in circulating water at very high speeds, making them reach the tens of millions of degrees necessary for atoms to bond and release energy. Critics say that the integration of nuclear weapons should continue to be a viable future for the future — in the meantime, nuclear testing continues to consume more energy than is produced.
But Kostadinova and his partner Dimitri Orlov were particularly interested in plasma within these reactors, which they realized could be the best place to fly a gas giant into space. Orlov works on a DIII-D fusion reactor, a tokamak experiment at the US Department of Energy station in San Diego, but has a reputation for space engineering.
Together, they used the DIII-D tools to test the extremes. Using a port at the bottom of the tokamak, they inserted carbon rods into the plasma, and used high-speed and infrared cameras and spectrometers to detect. how they were broken. Orlov and Kostadinova also fired a minuscule carbon dioxide in a reactor at high speeds, taking into account the degree to which the heat protection on the Galileo probe would encounter in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Conditions within the tokamak were very similar to plasma temperatures, the speed at which the material was moving, and even its structure: The Jovian atmosphere is mainly hydrogen and helium, DIII-D tokamak uses deuterium, which is a hydrogen isotope. “Instead of launching something very fast, instead we put a stopper to make it move faster,” says Orlov.
The experiments, presented at the American Physical Society conference in Pittsburgh this month, helped to confirm examples of ablation created by NASA scientists using information sent from Galileo’s research. But it also serves as a testament to the idea of a new type of experiment. “We are opening a new phase of research,” said Orlov. “No one has ever done it before.”
It is something that is very important in the industry. “There has been a shortage of new experimental methods,” says Yanni Barghouty, founder of Ideas of the company Cosmic Shielding Corporation, starting with the construction of air radiation shields. “It gives you the opportunity to paint faster and cheaper – there is a way to connect.”
Whether nuclear weapons combined will be the test site, it is unknown – they are more complex weapons designed for a specific purpose. Orlov and Kostadinov were given time at DIII-D as part of a special effort to use the reactor to increase scientific knowledge, using a port built into tokamak to test new devices with precision. But it is a costly process. Their day at the machine cost half a million dollars. As a result, such experiments will be performed gradually in the future, when the opportunity arises, to refine and refine computer experiments.