Sentence examples for mass driver from inspiring English sources
A mass driver, for instance, would have to be firmly attached to an asteroid in order to work, as would a small rocket engine, another proposed method.
Among the approaches being talked about are some that have been the stuff of science fiction for years: a mass driver, a sort of electromagnetic conveyor belt that would be planted on an asteroid and hurl dirt from its surface, or a solar concentrator, a parabolic mirror that would orbit the body and heat up the surface, creating a plume of vaporized material.
The 1981 Globe and Mail article that outlined the "mass driver" suggest government budgets would not be able to foot the bill for such expensive operations.
Some photos posted by Dafeng Cao, a Twitter user who keeps close tabs on Chinese military developments, show a ship-mounted gun that could very well be the country's very own homegrown electromagnetically propelled mass driver.
The "mass driver" as it is known, could "accelerate a one-kilogram (2.2 pound) payload to a speed of 800 km/h (500 mph) in less than one-fortieth of a second".
A four degree-of-freedom scaled (1 300) model of a high-rise building equipped with active mass driver is constructed on a wind tunnel to experimentally verify its applicability for wind-induced along-wind motion.
Other suggestions for moving asteroids include attaching large rocket engines to them; landing cannon-like devices called mass drivers to scoop up and hurl asteroid material away, creating an opposite recoil reaction; or attaching a giant solar sail that would use the pressure of sunlight to move the body slowly.
It is envisaged that the required mass of dust can be extracted from captured near Earth asteroids, whilst stabilised in the required position using the impulse provided by solar collectors or mass drivers used to eject material from the asteroid surface.
He took a sabbatical from Princeton to work on mass drivers at MIT.
Mass drivers are based on the coilgun design, adapted to accelerate a non-magnetic object.
He considered mass drivers critical for extracting the mineral resources of the Moon and asteroids.
