In operation, the xenon ions are accelerated to speeds of up to 40,000 meters per second, making NEXT the latest and by far the most powerful in a class of high-efficiency ion thrusters propelling ...

CLEVELAND — A NASA advanced ion propulsion engine has successfully operated for more than 48,000 hours, or 5 and a half years, making it the longest test duration of any type of space propuls… ...

Ion thrusters need a power source and an effective one if they will last more than a decade under thrust. The paper defined an ideal power plan that can output 1 kW per kg of weight.

The contract with D-Orbit includes two launch opportunities and operations, in June and October, on D-Orbit’s Ion spacecraft, Pale Blue said Jan. 8. “By partnering ...

While commercial ion thrusters are good enough for most LEO satellites, these engines only use “10% or less of a small spacecraft’s initial mass in propellant,” according to NASA.

Predicting the lifetime of an electric ion thruster is notoriously difficult. You have to account for the chamber wall effects, which are not present in space environments. Researchers within ...

One of them is Paris-headquartered ION-X. It hopes to build the most efficient propulsion system ever put in space. ION-X has developed a so-called electrohydrodynamic (EHD) electrospray thruster.

Electric space propulsion systems use energized atoms to generate thrust. The high-speed beams of ions bump against the graphite surfaces of the thruster, eroding them with each hit, and are the ...

NASA has turned on the electric Hall thrusters of Psyche, a spacecraft that’s now gently motoring toward a metal-rich asteroid embedded in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. The agency says ...

The propulsion system for NASA's planned moon-orbiting Gateway space station has been undergoing qualification testing at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

On the face of things, not much, but after seeing [Zachary Tong]’s latest video on liquid metal ion thrusters, we see that they seem to have a lot more in common than we’d initially thought.