Plasma plume will be produced and arrive at spacecraft when the electric thruster operates on orbit. It’s important to characterize the thruster plasma parameters because the plume has significant effects or hazards on spacecraft sub-systems and parts. Through the ground test data of the desired parameters, the major characteristics of the thruster plume will be achieved. Also it is very import...

While preliminary experiments with a cluster of four Busek 200-Watt (BHT-200-X3) Closed Drift Hall thrusters indicate reasonable performance scalability from single thruster experiments, cluster plume interactions are believed to give rise to an increased ion energy spectrum as well as cross-talk and synchronization between the thruster discharges. Recent experiments with a higher power cluster...

The design and fabrication of a newly proposed vaporizing liquid micro-thruster concept i s described. The intended purpose of this thruster concept is for use as an attitude control device o n new generat ions of very small spacecraft envisioned by the Nat ional Aeronaut ics and Space Administration (NASA), ranging in mass between 1 20 kg. The vaporizing liquid micro-thruster concept heavily r...

The results of 3D, single particle electron trajectory calculations are presented for the near-field of a laboratory E ×B Hall plasma thruster. For a prescribed static magnetic and electric field distribution, single electrons are launched and tracked from a simulated cathode. Collisions with external thruster surfaces are accounted for; however, field fluctuations are disregarded. Bulk statist...

ONERA is involved in the testing and development of new current-free electric thruster (helicon thruster or ECR thruster), using magnetized plasmas. For this development, a numerical tool is desirable to model the magnetized plasma, and assess the overall performances of the system. For this reason, a model for the plasma produced in the thruster has been developed. It boils down to a single-fl...

This paper describes the design and testing of a miniature, 3D-printed cold gas attitude control thruster for the NASA Ames Research Center BioSentinel mission, an interplanetary small spacecraft that will be launched on the EM-1 flight of SLS. Earth-orbiting small satellites typically use magnetic torque rods for momentum unloading, but these cannot be employed in interplanetary space due to t...

Small spacecraft that can be categorized as microsats, nanosats, and picosats has a strong potential for wide applications in communication, scientific experiments, and space exploration. In order to combine the advantages of both electric and chemical propulsion thrusters, a dual-mode microspike based thruster concept is proposed. For a fixed input power, it can operate in either a high-Isp mo...

This note investigates the minimal number of unilateral thrusters required for diierent versions of nonlinear controllability of a planar rigid body. For one to three unilateral thrusters, we get a new property with each additional thruster: one thruster yields small-time accessibility on the body's state space TSE(2); two thrusters yield global controllability on TSE(2); and three thrusters yi...

The Coaxial High ENerGy (CHENG) Thruster is a high power coaxial pulsed plasma accelerator that was first proposed in 1970 by D.Y. Cheng. Reported exhaust velocities on the order of 10m/s, thrust densities on the order of 10N/m and low erosion rates make this thruster attractive for a variety of space missions. However, little work has been published since 1970 and the acceleration mechanism is...