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posted by martyb on Monday October 16 2017, @06:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the to-infinity-and-beyond! dept.

A Hall-effect thruster designed by University of Michigan researchers, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force has achieved a maximum thrust of 5.4 Newtons. The "X3" thruster uses three channels of plasma instead of a single channel like most Hall thrusters. It is designed to operate at 200 kW but has been tested at a range of 5 kW to 102 kW so far:

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.

A manned Mars mission could require a thruster capable of operating at 500 kW-1 MW, if not more.

Previously: Researchers Improve the Design of Cylindrical Shaped Hall Thrusters


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  • (Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Monday October 16 2017, @10:39PM (2 children)

    by Fluffeh (954) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 16 2017, @10:39PM (#583199) Journal

    Someone who understands the math better than I might want to weigh in.

    It's not so much math as physics rather. Most propulsion systems require the propellant to be accelerated by the "engine" as such to push it out either in volume (normal chemical rockets that can spend all the TONS of fuel in a few minutes) or to push out a small volume at incredible speeds such as an Ion drive - to generate thrust and move the craft.

    These Hall Effect drives are the latter and work by making a decent magnetic field, then expelling a tiny amount of gas and stripping the electrons from it (making it magnetically changed). As the gas is then repulsed by the magnetic field, it is pushed away from the craft at 20-50 kilometers (12-30 miles) per second and in doing so, exacts an equal opposite pressure on the engine which is fixed to the craft. Due to the propellant moving at such incredible speeds, the thrust efficiency compared to the fuel needed is fantastic. The Deep Space 1 [wikipedia.org] spacecraft was accelerated to 4.3 kilometers (2.7 miles) per second using under 75 kilograms (165 pounds) of xenon gas propellant.

    The problem with Ion drives however was being able to effectively scale up the thrust generated. In a normal rocket, you can have a small system that uses a fuel, but you can just make it bigger to get scaled thrust. With Ion Drives, it was pretty easy (relatively speaking) to make a small drive with a very small thrust, but you couldn't just make everything bigger to get more thrust in the same way you could with a standard chemical propellant. This is exciting as it is moving forward in scaling up the system. It is good steps in the right direction!

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @11:06PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @11:06PM (#583207)

    Correction to your physics: the ion propulsion system works on ELECTRICALLY CHARGED particles (ions) being accelerated by an ELECTRIC field. Not magnetic.