It is official that Voyager 1 is now on the course of Interstellar travel. We all have the fantasy to know what is up there in the outer space and wanted to explore the deeper space. With the current technology, it takes us 22 years to travel to the nearest earth like planet GLIESE 581 G and GLIESE 667 CC, if we could travel at the speed of light or send a rocket at that speed.
NASA is currently working on Anti matter – matter propulsion which gives high energy to travel in the interstellar space. Anti-matter is opposite to matter, which has opposite charge to matter and empirical relations. Say Electron is negative charge and the opposite is Positron, which is positive charge, Proton as Anti-Proton and Neutron as Anti-Neutron.
The Anti-matter is either produced in nature due to radioisotopes or produced artificially from Particle accelerators with the bombardment of sub-atomic particles at high velocity creating at high energy. ( E.g., CERN, FERMI Labs ). It is important to know that, if not earth we have to find another earth like planet or likely habitable planet to survive. We need innovation in the propulsions for deep space explorations. When matter gets into contact with anti-matter, they annihilate giving high energy in the forms of gamma rays and releasing photons. We could use this high energy for deep space interstellar travel propulsions. If NASA is successful in making the Anti-matter propelled rockets, then we can travel to Mars in 3 months.
The challenges involved in this endeavor are:
- Producing the Anti-Matter
- Storing it at a suitable and stable condition
- Using it for applications in the propulsions.
Producing the Anti-matter would cost billion of dollars for just few grams of quantity. This is due to fact that, when matter and anti-matter comes into contact, then annihilate at fraction of seconds and it is tedious task to store it and as well as produce it. At Large Hadron Collider in CERN, the anti-matter produced in few years would be just few milligrams of quantity and they disappears within few fraction of second when in contact with matter. The total energy the CERN’s antimatter productions would only light a bulb.