Ion thrusters are an amazing spacecraft propulsion technology, providing very high efficiency with relatively little fuel. Yet getting one to produce more thrust than that required to lift a sheet ...

The AI-based technique to predict Hall Effect Ion Source developed by the research team can predict the performance of the thrust according to design variables with high accuracy, rendering it ...

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 ...

Pale Blue plans to demonstrate thruster performance in June and October 2025 on flights of D-Orbit’s ION Satellite Carrier. Since 2020, D-ORbit has deployed 105 satellites and hosted 48 payloads ...

ION-X, the electrospray propulsion specialist, has raised €13 million in a funding round. It will enable the company to industrialise the production of its ion thrusters. The company now aims to ...

World-renowned engineer Jacques Giérak founded ION-X in 2021 following decades of research into electrospray propulsion systems at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and CNES.

Create a prototype of an efficient aircraft capable of flying with ion propulsion. This is the aim of the IPROP project, led by Politecnico di Milano, and funded by the EU with an EIC pathfinder ...

NASA has turned on the electric Hall thrusters of Psyche, a spacecraft that’s now gently motoring toward a metal-rich asteroid embedded in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. The agency says ...

NASA's ion thrusters work through what is known as the Hall effect. Rather than use a chemical process to create propulsion, Hall-effecct ion thrusters use an electric field from solar panels to ...

NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland leads the development of ion thrusters for the agency, designing and evaluating thrusters for missions like Dawn and DART and the agency's Gateway lunar space ...

While commercial ion thrusters are good enough for most LEO satellites, these engines only use “10% or less of a small spacecraft’s initial mass in propellant,” according to NASA.