‘Impossible engine’ works in tests
NASA conducts more tests of its ‘impossible engine’, and the first public update in months suggests fuel-free thrusters do work — but they don’t know why. Paul March, one of the top engineers working the EM Drive thruster at the Eagleworks Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, posts the update on the NASA Spaceflight forum in response to a claim the unaccounted thrust is generated by something known as the Lorentz force, a force that is exerted by a magnetic field on a moving electric charge. March says his tests prove this is not true.
I will tell you that we first built and installed a second generation, closed face magnetic damper that reduced the stray magnetic fields in the vacuum chamber by at least an order of magnitude and any Lorentz force interactions it could produce, and yet the anomalous thrust signals remain.
March says they have managed to remove some of the errors from earlier tests – but still found signals of unexplained thrust.