Over the holiday period the arXivblog is re-running the most popular posts from 2008
23 May 2008: First test of exotic space thruster ends in explosion
In 2006, Mason Peck at Cornell University in Ithaca dreamt up with an entirely new way to control satellites orbiting planets that have a magnetic field. The idea is based on the Lorentz force: that a charged particle moving through a magnetic field experiences a force perpendicular to both its velocity and the field.