The Parker Solar Probe spacecraft, NASA's newest and most ambitious effort to study the sun, has broken a lot of records: it has gotten closer to the sun than any other spacecraft to date, its instruments have operated at ...
Condensed Matter
Nov 8, 2021
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334
For decades, scientists have been working to harness clean, renewable fusion energy, which occurs naturally in stars like our sun. Using strong magnetic fields to confine hot plasmas within a donut-shaped device called a ...
Plasma Physics
Nov 8, 2021
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6
After decades of inertial confinement fusion research, a record yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ) from fusion reactions was achieved in the laboratory for the first time during an experiment at Lawrence Livermore National ...
Plasma Physics
Nov 8, 2021
26
3804
The march towards fusion energy gain, required for commercial fusion energy, is not always visible. Progress occurs in fits and starts through experiments in national laboratories, universities, and more recently at private ...
Plasma Physics
Nov 8, 2021
3
53
Future fusion reactors have a conundrum: maintain a plasma core that is hotter than the surface of the sun without melting the walls that contain the plasma. Fusion scientists refer to this challenge as "core-edge integration." ...
Plasma Physics
Nov 8, 2021
0
394
Spacecraft have long used heat shields for protection during entry into planetary atmospheres. Future missions to the outer solar system will need more sophisticated materials than currently exist. The extreme heating conditions ...
Plasma Physics
Nov 8, 2021
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22
In controlled nuclear fusion, heavy isotopes of hydrogen fuse into helium, releasing a huge amount of energy in the process. A large portion of the energy released by a laboratory fusion reaction goes into hot helium ash ...
Plasma Physics
Nov 8, 2021
0
20
The U.S. scientific community is currently conceptualizing the first nuclear fusion power plants, which will revolutionize energy production. Like the sun and stars, a fusion power plant will produce energy by fusing light ...
Plasma Physics
Nov 8, 2021
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357
While movies show Earth as existing in a calm, pristine corner of the universe, in reality the near-Earth space environment is dangerous and dynamic. On any given day, hot charged particles and blobs of plasma, called the ...
General Physics
Nov 8, 2021
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918
The U.S. Fusion Outreach Team, a grassroots organization in the fusion community focused on reducing barriers to outreach efforts, has launched a new centralized website to engage an expanding workforce, media, educators, ...
Plasma Physics
Nov 8, 2021
0
17
