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My dumb follow up would be how much power is required to generate a magnetic field strong enough to perform like the Van Allen belt?


It's probably surprisingly achievable. Going off of proposed ideas to shield Mars... About 1T, or roughly an MRI machine (or less).

https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo...

I'm not sure if needs a certain distance away from the craft to fully shield.


i had always wondered how you'd get this to work at planet scale, but this idea of shielding from L1 is interesting as you wouldn't need planet sized radius. how do you power something at that level forever would be the $64k question. i'm guessing they'd park it similar to JWST where it's orbiting the Mars L1 point. man, these scientist types are smart ;-)




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