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But we have a problem. If the dust fills the volume of the mini-magnetosphere plasma, say, the way dust fills a vacuum cleaner bag, then the dusty plasma scales up to large size very poorly. This is because mass increases as the volume, whereas the thrust from the Sun only increases as the cross-sectional area. So if one were to convert a laboratory-sized dusty plasma into a mass-loading by dividing the total mass by the cross-section, it would look very promising at around 0.01 g/m2, but expanding it to 30 km results in 100’s of grams per square meter. Its an embarrassing calculation and could potentially prove fatal, but there does appear to be a solution.
If the dust were confined to a relatively thin layer, then there is almost no penalty in scaling up to a 30 km size. But how can we confine the dust into a layer? Several papers suggest a way.