Reply To: A new way of generating electricity

[mchargue]

jamesr wrote: The strong magnetic field effect you refer to has nothing to do with the spacecraft problem. This effect only becomes important in very strong fields, in many orders of magnitude stronger than you have in the solar wind out where we are, they are typically measured in nT = 10^-14Gauss, in FF we have fields of 1^9 Gauss, ie 23 orders of magnitude higher.

The point of the article seems to be that a relatively weak magnetic field was responsible for blocking the solar wind on the moon, due to magnetic fields ‘frozen’ into ferrous deposits. It also talked about how a similarly weak magnetic field was used in an experiment to qualify the effect, and how the result of the experiment led some scientists to believe that a magnetic shield was back on the table for manned spaceflight.

I drew attention to the article because it seems to catalog an affect that might help explain why electron heating was minimized in the presence of a magnetic field.