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
Proton in interaction with any type of normal (non-plasma) matter, low-velocity free protons are attracted to electrons in any atom or molecule with which they come in contact, causing the proton and molecule to combine. Such molecules are then said to be "protonated", and chemically they often, as a result, become so-called Brønsted acids. In chemistry, the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom is known as the atomic number, which determines the chemical element to which the atom belongs. For example, the atomic number of chlorine is 17; this means that each chlorine atom has 17 protons and