Kreutz Comets are Ultra-Fast Moving Objects – Can This Motion Be Exploited?
Authors: William Gardiner and Holger Isenberg
Description: We require a well understood means to transport us to distant starts in less than a lifetime. Our objective is to determine whether the Kreutz group of sun-grazing comets represent a material transport process that can be emulated. The Kreutz comets typically move through the solar system at 0.2% of lightspeed, 480-600 km/sec (1.3 million mph). This allows a typical Kreutz comet to cross the distance between Mars and Earth in as little as a week. As there have been some 3000 such objects observed by the SOHO sun-observing probe between 1996 and 2010, there is an apparent regular, repeatable, discoverable process here that has escaped our investigation. Our method is to examine the electrochemical nature of these plasma engulfed objects to gain insight into the manner of their apparent movement using the spectrographic information archived for these objects, as well as from data collected at comet 67P with their onboard Langmuir probe and apply the model of chemist Dr. Franklin Anariba describing the electrochemical interaction between comets and their environment within the heliosphere. The expected results will provide a design principle for a spacecraft that literally “couples to space,” to use a phrase offered by Marc Millis during his time with the NASA Breakthrough Physics Propulsion Project. Our conclusion will be that space is not an empty plenum, and the material manifestation of Marc’s original concept will be to predict the voltage gradients of these fast moving objects, or perhaps they are plasmoids, that essentially emulate the behavior of a load on a well-designed LRC circuit, but which also participate in the orbital behavior of all celestial objects in the observable universe.