Magnetic sail significant in the long term. In typical magnetic sail designs, the magnetic field is generated by a loop of superconducting wire. Because loops of current-carrying conductors tend to be forced outwards towards a circular shape by their own magnetic field, the sail could be deployed simply by unspooling the conductor and applying a current through it. The solar wind is a continuous stream of plasma that flows outwards from the Sun: near the Earth's orbit, it contains several million protons and electrons per cubic meter and flows at . The magnetic sail introduces a magnetic field into this plasma flow
Two-stream instability bunched in space in a propagating wave in a self-reinforcing way even though no particles move with the propagation velocity. In both the hot-beam and cold-beam case, the instability grows until the beam particles are trapped in the electric field of the wave. This is when the instability is said to "saturate". Two-stream instability The two-stream instability is a very common instability in plasma physics. It can be induced by an energetic particle stream injected in a plasma, or setting a current along the plasma so different species (ions and electrons) can have different drift velocities. The energy from the