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Ion Thusters

 
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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 13, 2017 7:50 pm    Post subject: Ion Thusters Reply with quote

A thruster that's being developed for a future NASA mission to Mars broke several records during recent tests, suggesting that the technology is on track to take humans to the Red Planet within the next 20 years, project team members said.



The X3 thruster, which was designed by researchers at the University of Michigan in cooperation with NASA and the U.S. Air Force, is a Hall thruster — a system that propels spacecraft by accelerating a stream of electrically charged atoms, known as ions. In the recent demonstration conducted at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Ohio, the X3 broke records for the maximum power output, thrust and operating current achieved by a Hall thruster to date, according to the research team at the University of Michigan and representatives from NASA.



"We have shown that X3 can operate at over 100 kW of power," said Alec Gallimore, who is leading the project, in an interview with Space.com. "It operated at a huge range of power from 5 kW to 102 kW, with electrical current of up to 260 amperes. It generated 5.4 Newtons of thrust, which is the highest level of thrust achieved by any plasma thruster to date," added Gallimore, who is dean of engineering at the University of Michigan. The previous record was 3.3 Newtons, according to the school.



Hall thrusters and other types of ion engines use electricity (usually generated by solar panels) to expel plasma — a gas-like cloud of charged particles — out a nozzle, thus generating thrust. This technique can propel spacecraft to much greater speeds than chemical propulsion rockets can, according to NASA.

That's why researchers are so interested in ion propulsion's potential application for long-distance space travel. Whereas the maximum velocity that can be achieved by a chemical rocket is about 5 kilometers per second, a Hall thruster could get a craft up to 40 kilometers per second, Gallimore said.

Ion engines are also known to be more efficient than chemical-powered rockets, featuring what Gallimore described as a better "miles per gallon" ratio. A Hall-thruster-powered spacecraft would get cargo and astronauts to Mars using much less propellant than a chemical rocket, he said. (A common propellant for ion thrusters is xenon; indeed, NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which is currently orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres, uses this gas.)

The trade-off with ion thrusters, however, is that they are very low thrust and therefore must operate for a long time to accelerate a spacecraft to high speeds, according to NASA. (In addition, ion thrusters aren't powerful enough to overcome Earth's gravitational pull, so they cannot be used to launch spacecraft.)

Next year, the team will run an even bigger test, which aims to prove that the thruster can operate at full power for 100 hours. Gallimore said the engineers are also designing a special magnetic shielding system that would keep the plasma away from the walls of the thruster to prevent damage and enable the thruster to operate reliably for even longer periods of time. Gallimore said that without the shielding a flight version X3 would probably start experiencing problems after several thousand hours of operations. A magnetically-shielded version could run for several years at full power, according to Gallimore.



From : SPACE.COM
https://www.space.com/38444-mars-thruster-design-breaks-records.html
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