Documents / Report
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document from the Defense Intelligence Agency is dated 3 January 2011. It was produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program as part of a series of advanced technology reports. The report asks whether negative mass exists and whether it could be used for propulsion. It concludes that one route might be an ultra-light form of matter that could have gathered at the Moon's center. Reaching it would take a tunnel dug with thermonuclear shape charges.
“The Times”16 pages
UNCLASSIFIED//F811. 8FFll!lllit 1?1!11!! t!IHL I To make a tunnel, a cylindrical, rather than spherical, volume of crushed rocks is desired. For this reason a thermonuclear shape charge or an explosive lens is better suited to shatter the rocks. In the center of the moon the temperature is several thousand degrees centigrade. With the heat diffusion equation given by (109) where Xis the heat diffusion coefficient, the diffusion time for a layer of thickness xis (110) For lunar rocks one has x~4x10-3cm2/s. Taking the example x;:::2Qm;:::2x103cm, one finds that r=l0 9 s~30yr, and at the high rock temperatures the heat diffusion time would be uncomfortably long. The situation is drastically changed for a layer of crushed rocks, because there it is possible to remove heat by a coolant pumped through the porous medium of the crushed rocks. At the high temperatures of several thousand degrees centigrade, a liquid alkali metal, for example lithium, abundantly available on the moon, could be used as a coolant. The velocity the coolant diffuses into the crushed rocks is determined by Darcy's law v~-Dgradp, (111) where p is the pressure, D = Kj pg, with K ~ 1 cm/s a typical value. If the pressure gradient is provided by the gravitational force one has gradp = pg and hence lvl ~ IC~ 1 cm/s. (112) 34 UNCLASSIFIED//EiOAt OEiEiJCJ0I 1!S5 ONI X
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 43 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.