Watch NASA Begins-Trying of Revolutionary E-Sail Technology

NASA’s engineers have started testing the concept for a new impulsion system that could lessen the moment it takes for spacecraft to enter the interstellar space. This proposed propulsion (also called ‘Proton Power System’ would interrelate with particles discharged by the sun, repelling protons to generate push and accomplish extraordinary speeds. Scientists say this could bring spacecraft to the heliopause in simply 10 years – a feat that took the Voyager roughly 35 years. The suggested model is called the Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System (Herts) E-Sail, and it require no built-in propellant to work.

As an alternative to built-in propellant, the E-Sail would be short of by solar wind to touch the heliopause – the edge of our solar system. A gently rotating spacecraft would set up 10 to 20 electrically charged aluminium wires to create a massive 'E-Sail.' Each wire would be just one millimetre thick but range almost 12 and a half miles in length, roughly the equal of 219 football fields.
The E-Sail would repeal the protons graceful through the solar wind, generating the thrust. Bruce Wiegmann, an wangle in Marshall's Advanced Concepts Office and the chief researcher for the HERTS E-Sail, said:
 Engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama have initiated the tests which will last for over 2 years.
These tests will conclude the quantity of protons bounced by the wires and the amount of electrons attracted to them.
The researchers will as well conduct plasma testing, and expand models of the data for further increase of the E-Sail.
This concept builds off a formation of Dr Pekka Janhunen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute, but scientists say there is still a great deal to be tested, and it will possibly take at least 10 years before it can be put to practical use.

While the test will be approved out, during that time the effective area of the E-Sail would grow; at 1AU its operative area would be about 232 square miles, but at 5 AU this would shield additional than 463 miles.
Normally, the energy of solar photons disperses when a solar sail craft touches the asteroid belt at 5 AU, the scientists clarify, resulting the acceleration to stop.

But, it's supposed that the E-Sail would carry on to accelerate far beyond this point. Wiegmann said:

NASA's Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause and went into the interstellar space in 2012, it took nearly 35 years into its journey, and according to recent calculation this radical 'proton control system would take only 10.