Air-Breathing Electric Thruster Could Keep Satellites in Low Earth Orbit for Years

“This project began with a novel design to scoop up air molecules as propellant from the top of Earth’s atmosphere at around 200 km altitude with a typical speed of 7.8 km/s."

"Instead of simply measuring the resulting density at the collector to check the intake design, we decided to attach an electric thruster. In this way, we proved that we could indeed collect and compress the air molecules to a level where thruster ignition could take place, and measure the actual thrust. At first we checked our thruster could be ignited repeatedly with xenon gathered from the particle beam generator.”