Project Title: Mars B : Modeling Construction of Geo-Magentic Field
BASIS Advisor: Mr. Adams
Internship Location: NuFORENSICS
Onsite Mentor: Dr. Scott Carpenter
Habitable land has always been deemed as scarce and limited. We see this concept everywhere, from economics to history to biology. This idea of scarcity has inevitably driven a spike in the interest of inhabiting other planets, such as Mars. Mars has many shared traits with Earth that make it the top candidate for colonizing: twenty-four hours in a day, the presence of water, and a cycle of different seasons. In this project, I will work with team members at NuFORENSICS to study the potential of building a superconducting ring around Mars, a step that would create a geo-magnetic field (similar to that of Earth’s) around the planet, helping to ward off solar wind, and consequently move humanity one step closer to the goal of living on Mars. To model such a ring, we will need to study dipole magnetic fields, superconductors, and inductance. In addition, there must be a consideration of materials and costs, as well as the ring’s impact on society and health. Through this project, we will explore a solution that has not yet been researched.
My Posts
Final Week
May 14, 2019
Week 12: Although this was the final week for our senior project, my work on this project will continue through the summer. But, I do have some findings ready and have included them in my presentation. Both my advisers (internal and external) went through my presentation in detail and I’ve been working on improving it […]
Superconductor and Current Ring
May 06, 2019
Week 11: This week I continued researching superconductor materials. Type II superconductors are the ones capable of withstanding high temperatures and so, I looked more into materials that fall under this category. YBCO and BSCCO are two of the more powerful material types and I have focused on these two for further research. In addition to […]
Types and Findings
Apr 29, 2019
Week 10: This week I worked on looking into the types of superconductors and their differences. After I found so many different hoop and radial stress equations, I thought it would be best to research actual materials and find their Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio, two of the variables in the force equations. My research […]
More Stress and Modules
Apr 22, 2019
Week 9: The past couple weeks, I’ve been mentioning hoop and radial stress. This week I continued my work on these force equations and have found even more materials that don’t match with the rest. At least I’m clear now that the electromagnetic forces cause the stress on the materials and that there is some […]
Stress Part 2
Apr 15, 2019
Week 8: This week, I returned to the topic of hoop and radial stress. I mentioned a few weeks ago that the equation for hoop stress for a superconducting magnet was difficult to find. My research this week was tedious and has given me the same headache. While researching, I noticed that everyone used the […]
Energy Storage
Apr 08, 2019
Week 7: This week, I researched methods of energy storage for our superconducting ring. If the ring fails, at any point in time, we would need to store the energy. This way, once the ring is fixed, the energy can be used again, without being lost. The main type of energy storage I looked into […]
Benchmarking and Stress
Apr 01, 2019
Week 6: Last week, I worked on the magnetic dipole moment and its calculations. This past week, I have implemented the sub-module in our main spreadsheet. With the sub-module integrated in the system, I tried to benchmark it with the value of Earth’s magnetic dipole moment. Since the magnetic dipole moment is calculated by multiplying […]
Magnetic Dipole Moment
Mar 25, 2019
Week 5: The beginning part of this week just followed up on the mineralogy research done the previous week. I created another library for the data, inputting all the elements and their concentrations. Even though this task was simple, it was extremely slow, since each element for each planet needed to have its own name […]
Mineralogy Part 2
Mar 18, 2019
Week 4: Last week, I was busy compiling data on the elemental composition of Mars and Earth. This week wasn’t much different; I merely continued researching. While researching, I stumbled across a textbook published in 2009 that has pages of data on Mars’ surface composition. The only problem was that an average of all the […]
Mineralogy
Mar 11, 2019
Week 3: This past week was, in all aspects, quite slow. I focused on researching the elemental composition of Mars and Earth. I learned of the slow process of planet formation and the slow accumulation of data on Mars. As I was going through various websites and papers, I noticed that no one had really […]
Terraforming Mars
Feb 26, 2019
Week 2: My focus for week 2 was terraforming Mars. You might wonder what terraforming Mars has to do with modeling an artificial geomagnetic field. Well, the two concepts really go hand in hand. Terraforming is a process of trying to make a place (in this case, Mars) more like Earth. And, the geomagnetic field […]
Scientists and Top-Down Learning
Feb 19, 2019
Week 1: Before I start diving into what I did this week, I think it’s appropriate to cover what my project is about first and why I chose it. The main goal of the project is to model an artificial magnetic field around Mars, supposedly able to not only protect against solar wind, but also […]