electrostatic ion thruster

These were electrostatic ion thrusters using mercury and cesium as the reaction mass.

It was similar to the general design of a gridded electrostatic ion thruster with mercury as its fuel.

In practice the lifetime of electrostatic ion thrusters is limited by several processes:

Electrostatic ion thrusters have accelerated ions to speeds reaching 100 km/s.

Electrostatic ion thrusters use the Coulomb force and accelerate the ions in the direction of the electric field.

Gridded electrostatic ion thrusters commonly utilize xenon gas.

Gridded electrostatic ion thruster research (past/present):

Electrostatic ion thrusters have also achieved a specific impulse of 30-100 kN s/kg, better than most other ion thruster types.

Electrostatic ion thruster (Ion Bombardment)

An electrostatic ion thruster is a design for ion thrusters (a highly-efficient low-thrust spacecraft propulsion running on electrical power).

An ion thruster (more specifically an electrostatic ion thruster) is one of several types of spacecraft propulsion, specifically electric propulsion.

Conventional electrostatic ion thrusters possess only two grids, one high voltage and one low voltage, which perform both the ion extraction and acceleration functions.

Current methods of propelling a spacecraft with electricity include the arcjet rocket, the electrostatic ion thruster, the Hall effect thruster, and Field Emission Electric Propulsion.

The NSTAR electrostatic ion thruster, developed at NASA Glenn, achieves a specific impulse of one to three thousand seconds.

Unlike an electrostatic ion thruster, PIT requires no electrodes (which are susceptible to erosion) and its power can be scaled up simply by increasing the number of pulses per second.

The Dual-Stage 4-Grid (DS4G) is an electrostatic ion thruster design currently under development by the European Space Agency, in collaboration with the Australian National University.

NASA is currently working on a 20-50 kW electrostatic ion thruster called HiPEP which will have higher efficiency, specific impulse, and a longer lifetime than NSTAR.

A test of the NASA Solar electric propulsion Technology Application Readiness (NSTAR) electrostatic ion thruster resulted in 30,472 hours (roughly 3.5 years) of continuous thrust at maximum power.

MagBeam is different from a traditional electrostatic ion thruster in several ways, the primary one being that instead of the fuel and propulsion system being part of the payload craft, they are instead located on a platform held in orbit.

SERT-1 (Space Electric Rocket Test) was a NASA probe used to test electrostatic ion thruster design and was built by NASA's Lewis Research Center (now NASA Glenn).

The cylindrical 9 m long by 6 m diameter long stainless-steel clad tank is utilized for Hall effect thruster, electrostatic ion thruster, magnetoplasmadynamic thruster, and arcjet testing as well as space tether and plasma diagnostics research.

NASA Glenn continued to develop electrostatic ion thrusters through the 1980s, developing the NSTAR engine, that was used successfully on the Deep Space 1 probe, the first mission to fly an interplanetary trajectory using electric propulsion as the primary propulsion.