The technology is similar to the successful ion engines that powered NASA’s Deep Space 1 and ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft. Solar power is used to generate an electric field that fires ions out at high velocities. It doesn’t provide a lot of thrust, but it can run for weeks or months, accelerating a spacecraft to enormous speed.
The Georgia Tech design would allow operators to adjust the spacecraft’s exhaust velocity depending on its requirements. It would run at maximum acceleration during orbit transfers, but then conserve fuel during other times.
They say they’re still years away from commercial applications, though.
Original Source: Georgia Tech News Release
When I heard about this I felt an amused twinge of envy. Over the last…
The Hubble Space Telescope has gone through its share of gyroscopes in its 34-year history…
Any event in the cosmos generates gravitational waves, the bigger the event, the more disturbance.…
During the Space Race, scientists in both the United States and the Soviet Union investigated…
The Milky Way has a missing pulsar problem in its core. Astronomers have tried to…
Space travel and exploration was never going to be easy. Failures are sadly all too…