ion engine

The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission is on its way to Mercury, but instead of coasting to the smallest planet in the Solar System, it will be helped along by four state-of-the-art ion thrusters developed by an industrial consortium led by British company QinetiQ.

A team of researchers has come up with plasma beam that can push space debris out of orbit. Mounted on a satellite, the two-way facing beam is produced by a bespoke ion thruster that uses its discharge to decelerate debris so it can burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.

Working in coordination with NASA engineers from Glenn Research and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory​,Aerojet Rocketdyne says it has completed its early systems integration test​ of the Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) 13-kW Hall thruster, clearing the way for further development.

NASA has awarded a US$67 million, 36-month contract to Redmond, Washington-based Aerojet Rocketdyne to design and develop an Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS).

Dr Patrick Neumann of the University of Sydney has developed a new ion drive as part of his PhD thesis. The drive outperforms the best one devised by NASA and holds the promise of "Mars and back on a tank of fuel."

When the unmanned X-37B mission lifts off from Cape Canaveral AFB on May 20, it will be carrying a Hall thruster as part of an experiment to improve the design for use on Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) military communications spacecraft.

On Monday, NASA announced that its advanced ion propulsion engine operated for 48,000 hours, or five and a half years, giving it the record for the longest test duration of any type of space propulsion system.

NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) ion engine has set a new record by clocking up 43,000 hours of continuous operation.