A team of engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif, successfully tested a new ion propulsion engine design, one of several candidate propulsion technologies under study by NASA’s ...

Plasmoid thrusters have had successful proof of principle experiments done in the lab at Princeton University. The systems should be compact and simple and based upon magnetism present in solar flares ...

Demand for electric propulsion is growing for space applications and the proposed technological solutions are evolving fast. Gridded Ion Technology allows a more efficient management of Xe, providing ...

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has successfully run an ion thruster for 30,352h - four times its design life - in an effort to observe long-term wear effects. The engine, a spare from the Deep ...

Pale Blue plans to demonstrate its 1U water ion thruster twice in 2025 on D-Orbit’s Ion Satellite Carrier, an orbital transfer vehicle. The contract with D-Orbit includes two launch opportunities and ...

Most people are probably familiar with iodine through its role as a disinfectant. But if you stayed awake through high school chemistry, then you may have seen a demonstration where powdered iodine ...

What do scanning electron microscopes and satellites have in common? On the face of things, not much, but after seeing [Zachary Tong]’s latest video on liquid metal ion thrusters, we see that they ...

Aerojet has completed manufacture and integration testing of a xenon propellant management system (PMS) for phase one of NASA's evolutionary xenon thruster (NEXT) next-generation ion engine ...

A satellite company named Maxar recently delivered a passenger van-sized chunk of spacecraft to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. This chassis will serve as the backbone for a robotic ...

All DoD and other U.S. strategic satellites and technology platforms require propulsion subsystems operating in space to provide the impulse necessary to adjust velocity, change orbit altitude, and ...