Engage the plasma drive, Mars here we come

President Obama’s call earlier this year to send space craft to Mars by 2015 is good news for space enthusiasts but more so for Australian physicist Dr Christine Charles who has invented a new type of plasma rocket drive.

This is the supercharger of all space engines and Dr Charles and a team of physicists at the Australian National University developed the first prototype.

One would think that this would be a major news story in Australia - and ABC Radio did a small story a couple of years ago - but there it lay. This is not unusual in science reporting in Australia.

While her invention potentially changes space travel, much of the media still focuses on TV visuals, the trivial or things that go "bang" (think of the Mythbusters). It’s as if science per se is not interesting unless things explode.

Lets have a look at Dr Charles’ Helicon Double Layer Thruster (HDLT) engine.

Currently is would take an astronaut about 14 months to reach Mars and return to Earth. With the HDLT it would take three to four months - cutting 10 months off a round trip.

Her ion propulsion drive rocket is safer and cheaper than any other similar design and works with a variety of propellants, including carbon dioxide (the main constituent of Mars’ atmosphere). When travelling in deep space, surrounded by radiation and in zero gravity, velocity is everything.

Her discovery had its roots in jazz. Back in 1999 she was attending a jazz course at ANU. She had been thinking of harmonics and how the same notes on different scales beat together.

“I went back to the lab thinking about harmonics. I started to explore how plasmas (energy) could be used and I discovered, under certain conditions, a spontaneous double layer of energy appears within the plasma and accelerate ions that passed though it,” Dr Charles said.

This electric double layer is the electrostatic equivalent of a sheer drop. The plasma ions passing through the double layer experience a sudden and very forceful acceleration in the same way water does as it flows over a cliff. The same double layer physics are behind the awesome light show of the aurora. In this case, the charged particles of the solar wind enter the Earth’s atmosphere at the poles.

While the HDLT has a fraction of the power of the rockets that launch the space shuttle, it uses far less fuel and gets more thrust as a ration of the fuel it burns, making it ideal for interplanetary missions.

So you’d think what with Obama’s statement re a return to the Mars missions, the fact that Dr Charles is an Australian, the sheer velocity the HDLT can develop and the curious "jazz" angle of the original conception, that this would be a lay down misere news story.

Not one agency picked it up. I alerted the various news agencies and ANU did as well.

Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and "breakthrough" stories.

Wacky stories are everywhere. Did you know that infidelity was genetic? That there are allergies to electricity? Apparently scientists can now write love as an equation - you get the idea.

My favourite is the paradoxical health story. TV Current Affairs will almost certainly run the "red wine and chocolate is good for you" story sometime between Christmas and Easter. Or, how you can lose 10 kilos by eating nothing except sea kelp.

Scare stories are a stalwart of media science. Based on minimal evidence and expanded with poor understanding of its significance, they help perform the most crucial function for the media, which is selling you, the reader, to their advertisers. Recently scare stories include rising sea levels and killer meteorites.

Once journalists get their teeth into what they think is a scare story, trivial increases in risk are presented, often out of context, which makes the danger appear disproportionately large. So it’s almost a dead certainty that a killer meteor will hit the earth within the next 25 million years. Keep in mind that man has only been walking on two legs for less than a million. But that meteor is out there somewhere.

The last category is the media obsession with "new breakthroughs": a more subtly destructive category of science story. It's quite understandable that newspapers should feel it's their job to write about new stuff. But in the aggregate, these stories sell the idea that science, and indeed the whole empirical worldview, is only about tenuous, new, hotly contested data.

Articles about robustly-supported emerging themes and ideas would be more stimulating, of course, than most single experimental results, and these themes are, most people would agree, the real developments in science. But they emerge over months and several bits of evidence, not single rejiggable press releases.

And this is where Dr Charles and her plasma drive comes in. It’s a breakthrough story that is developing. But its slow, complex work. The fact that one-day an Australian rocket may take men and women to Mars and beyond apparently isn’t worth a mention in the media.

“We all need a common dream and space travel is a good one. But there is a lot of discipline and complex technology involved in sending a manned spacecraft in to space. One of the payoffs is that in the process we learn a lot on how to manage our own planet, how to train young people and how to transfer technologies,” Dr Charles said.

What we need is science media who can recognise news stories from PR spin.