For those who don’t know, the plasma magnet sail is a type of magnetic sail invented by John Slough, which should be able to produce orders of magnitude more thrust than ion drives of similar power consumption. It has been tested in laboratory vacuum chambers, but not in space, which is important, since it relies on large-scale space plasma phenomena to work.
The device itself is just a set of magnet coils and an RF power supply, which drive large ring currents in the surrounding plasma that generate a magnetic field which defects the solar wind. In principle, it could accelerate a spacecraft up to solar wind velocity of roughly 450km/s, and could create drag in the ionospheres or magnetospheres of planets to enter in capture orbits around them.
This seems to be the most recent paper on the subject
If this technology can be miniaturized down to a cubesat level, (I think it can but it would take a PIC plasma simulation to be sure) a cubesat could accelerate to tens of kilometers per second in a few weeks, making it the fastest object ever launched by humans.
Desired skill set: Electrical engineering, Cubesat design and construction, Space plasma modeling
