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
Nonthermal plasma Nonthermal plasma A nonthermal plasma, cold plasma or non-equilibrium plasma is a plasma which is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, because the electron temperature is much hotter than the temperature of heavy species (ions and neutrals). As only electrons are thermalized, their Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution is very different than the ion velocity distribution. When one of the velocities of a species does not follow a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, the plasma is said to be non-Maxwellian. A kind of common nonthermal plasma is the mercury-vapor gas within a fluorescent lamp, where the "electron gas" reaches a temperature of while the rest of the