Most self-respecting starships in science fiction stories use antimatter as fuel for a good reason – it’s the most potent fuel known. While tons of chemical fuel are needed to propel a human mission to Mars, just tens of milligrams of antimatter will do (a milligram is about one-thousandth the weight of a piece of the original M&M candy). However, in reality this power comes with a price. Some antimatter reactions produce blasts of high energy gamma rays. Gamma rays are like X-rays on steroids. They penetrate matter and break apart molecules in cells, so they are not healthy to be around. High-energy gamma rays can also make the engines radioactive by fragmenting atoms of the engine material. The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is funding a team of researchers working on a new design for an antimatter-powered spaceship that avoids this nasty side effect by producing gamma rays with much lower energy. Antimatter is sometimes called the mirror image of normal matter because while it looks just like ordinary matter, some properties are reversed. For example, normal electrons, the familiar particles that carry electric current in everything from cell phones to plasma TVs, have a negative electric charge. Anti-electrons have a positive charge, so scientists dubbed them "positrons". When antimatter meets matter, both annihilate in a flash of energy.

This complete conversion to energy is what makes antimatter so powerful. Even the nuclear reactions that power atomic bombs come in a distant second, with only about three percent of their mass converted to energy. Previous antimatter-powered spaceship designs employed antiprotons, which produce high-energy gamma rays when they annihilate. The new design will use positrons, which make gamma rays with about 400 times less energy. The NIAC research is a preliminary study to see if the idea is feasible. If it looks promising, and funds are available to successfully develop the technology, a positron-powered spaceship would have a couple advantages over the existing plans for a human mission to Mars, called the Mars Reference Mission.

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I've heard bits and pieces of what Anti-matter is, and I'd like clarification. If matter is destroyed when it meets anti-matter, doesn't that throw the conservation of mass theory out the window? Wouldn't that mean that there is more than a definite amount of matter in the universe? Would that mean that matter can be created somehow? I'm just curious.

Anti-matter

What I understand is, antimatter is very hard to produce in anything like to quantities we'd need. So either the Mars mission would require a very, very small amount, or we've found a way to produce it in bigger batches.

Is it true the public finds out about technology like this only after the military has done what it needs to do with it first?

If we're learning about this now, could it be possible that working models have been made and used for quite a few years already?

Mass and energy are interchangable, one can be converted to the other, this happens all the time in nuclear reactions. Energy/mass is however conserved.



You wouldn't need much, which is the attraction, as it says in the original post,



However we are a long way off of being able to produce even that amount. This is a project for the future.

In many case of course. The military will make secret any technology which would give it's nation an advantage/put it's nation at risk if in other hands.

In this case though the idea of anti-matter propelled spaceships has been around for many decades. The USS Enterprise was powered by anti-matter, and Star Trek started filming in 1966.



Highly unlikely. Anti-matter is not something you can knock up easily.

This is truly fascinating. But it was always my understanding that to produce even very small amount (talking about few particles) was way too expensive to be practical at present time and was only done in laboratories to basically prove that it is possible.
Incredible!
I can’t wait to see where this project will lead and how it will progress.
GO NASA!!!

I still want my flying robot car.

You are correct, it is far too expensive to do now. This is currently a purely paper exercise (just as organisations were designing rockets to the moon in the 1930's even though the technology was not available).

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum...=68932&hl=alien (Part 1)
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum...=70318&hl=alien (Part 2)


Alien Engineering...from History channel

it talks about anti matter on it...

pretty cool..

How do you store anti-matter because if it touches anything, it gets destroyed.

Another bit of technology from Star Trek, magnetic confinement. You store it using strong magnetic fields.

Anti-matter is created in particle accelerators right?

At the moment yes, but only a few particles at a time.