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
Plasma oscillation the Debye length, the oscillations are only weakly modified by the pressure term, but at small scales the pressure term dominates and the waves become dispersionless with a speed of formula_12. For such waves, however, the electron thermal speed is comparable to the phase velocity, i.e., so the plasma waves can accelerate electrons that are moving with speed nearly equal to the phase velocity of the wave. This process often leads to a form of collisionless damping, called Landau damping. Consequently, the large-"k" portion in the dispersion relation is difficult to observe and seldom of consequence. In a bounded plasma,