The US Air Force's most public secret, the X-37B unmanned spaceplane, is now a little less top secret. The Air Force has revealed that when the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) 4 mission lifts off from Cape ...

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 ...

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 ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more! You are ...

French Prime Minister Jean Castex, Frédérique Vidal, French research and innovation minister, and Bruno le Maire, French economy and finance minister, are shown holding the ExoMG Hall-effect thruster ...

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 ...

Hall thrusters utilise electric propulsion through the ionisation and acceleration of plasma under crossed electric and magnetic fields, offering efficient and reliable performance for spacecraft.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. The U.S. Air Force will test an innovative spacecraft thruster this month when it launches the ...

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 ...

In short, Hall thrusters are electric rocket engines that use a high-speed stream of plasma to push spacecraft forward. Up until just recently, this technology was used to make slight adjustments to a ...