Electric propulsion (EP) is the future of astronautics. It can already compete successfully with chemical thrusters, especially for attitude control, orbit transfer and/or orbital station-keeping as ...

Hall thrusters are an efficient kind of electric propulsion used in orbit, and they need to be large to produce a lot of thrust. Things are going to change with the new study from the University of ...

Researchers from the Harbin Institute of Technology in China have created a new inlet design for Cylindrical shaped Hall thrusters (CHTs) that may significantly increase the thrust and allows ...

To prolong the lifespan of Hall thrusters, scientists have experimentally optimized the operation of a novel, wall-less thruster prototype developed a year ago by the same team. The preliminary ...

BOSTON — A small Massachusetts firm is hoping that an experimental satellite launched for the U.S. Air Force last month will open the doors to widespread adoption of their thruster technology and a ...

Hall thrusters are a type of electric propulsion machine that obtains thrust by ionizing propellants such as xenon and krypton and discharging the generated ions with a magnetic field. It was invented ...

Engineers at NASA's Glenn Research Center are advancing the propulsion system that will propel the first ever mission to redirect an asteroid for astronauts to explore in the 2020s. NASA's Asteroid ...

A Hall thruster is powering many of the satellites moving around Earth right now. It needs 100 million (yes, you read that right, 100 million) times less fuel than chemical thrusters. But it was never ...

Engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center are advancing the propulsion system that will propel the first ever mission to redirect an asteroid for astronauts to explore in the 2020s. NASA’s Asteroid ...

The X3 Nested-channel Hall Thruster (NHT), is a 100-kW class thruster developed jointly by the Plasmadynamics and Electric Propulsion Laboratory (PEPL) at the University of Michigan, led by Alec ...

For its crazy 2020 asteroid capture mission and other projects, NASA is developing next-gen "Hall effect thrusters" to corral an asteroid and put it into the moon's orbit. At the same time, the ...