What's NASA Up To And Other Space Stuff

[Khendraja'aro]

Creating a magnetic field of a few Tesla is relatively easy. MRIs routinely operate at 1.5 or 3 T, and there are some high powered ones for research that go as high at 7-9 T. Some very high end systems get up into the tens of Tesla. There are some engineering issues, of course - these magnets are supercooled, so effective cooling of them would be an important task. Power consumption is also an issue - these tend to be very power hungry. Maybe it's possible to make a 2-3 T magnet that doesn't require cooling or power, but I'm not really an expert.

The bigger issue I can imagine, though, is understanding exactly what geometry we're talking about here. Making a clinical grade scanner at 3 T isn't that hard - but making the same size magnet at 9 T would be prohibitively expensive/difficult. Generally, the stronger your magnetic field, the smaller bore your NMR/MRI machine will become. Whether this is a relevant consideration for this proposed shield is not clear to me - are there specific geometry/size/shape requirements for the magnetic field, or does it just need to be of a given strength? Etc.

An even bigger issue: Keeping that thing at the Lagrange point. Because the magnetic field the device creates makes it essentially a huge solar sail.

[wiggin]

An even bigger issue: Keeping that thing at the Lagrange point. Because the magnetic field the device creates makes it essentially a huge solar sail.

Good point.

[EyeKhan]

An even bigger issue: Keeping that thing at the Lagrange point. Because the magnetic field the device creates makes it essentially a huge solar sail.

That seems like a show stopper. So the force of the solar wind on the magnetic field would transfer to the the source of the magnetic field and push the device away from the sun? If so, as a side note, is a big magnetic field then a candidate to replace a physical solar sail as propulsion? I suppose, the benefit of the physical sail is it does not require an energy source to keep it running...