NASA's New Ion Engine to Send Astronauts to Mars
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A new ion engine has successfully been tested in a lab, proving itself to be 25 times more powerful than NASA's current state-of-the-art one. It could one day assist humans in reaching Mars.
Ion engines are very different to the usual sort of thrusters that burn chemical propellant. Using electromagnetic fields, they accelerate ions - charged atoms - out through a nozzle to provide thrust, hence they are often described as using "electric propulsion." Though they are slow at first, these engines' thrust can build up incrementally to achieve high velocities, and because they use 90 percent less propellant than chemical rockets, ion engines also reduce the mass of a spacecraft and make launch less expensive.
Currently, the most powerful ion engine on a spacecraft belongs to NASA's Psyche mission to the asteroid of the same name - which is filled with so much precious metal it could make everyone on Earth a billionaire. Its engine has been able to ramp up to a velocity of 124,000 miles (200,000 km) per hour.
"This marks the first time in the United States that an electric propulsion system has operated at power levels this high, reaching up to 120 kilowatts," says NASA. "We will continue to make strategic investments that will propel that next giant leap."
"Designing and building these thrusters over the past couple of years has been a long lead-up to this first test," says a senior research scientist at JPL. "It’s a huge moment for us because we not only showed that the thruster works, but we also hit the power levels that we were targeting. And we know we have a good testbed to begin addressing the challenges to scaling up."
