{"id":118021,"date":"2021-01-03T20:26:36","date_gmt":"2021-01-04T04:26:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/image-plasma-propulsion-for-small-satellites"},"modified":"2021-01-03T20:26:36","modified_gmt":"2021-01-04T04:26:36","slug":"image-plasma-propulsion-for-small-satellites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/image-plasma-propulsion-for-small-satellites","title":{"rendered":"Image: Plasma propulsion for small satellites"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/image-plasma-propulsion-for-small-satellites.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A test firing of Europe\u2019s Helicon Plasma Thruster, developed with ESA by SENER and the Universidad Carlos III\u2019s Plasma &amp; Space Propulsion Team (EP2-UC3M) in Spain. This compact, electrodeless and low voltage design is ideal for the propulsion of small satellites, including maintaining the formation of large orbital constellations.<\/p>\n<p>While traditional chemical <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/propulsion\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">propulsion<\/a> have fundamental upper limits, electric propulsion pumps extra energy into the thrust reaction to reach much higher propellant velocities by accelerating propellant using <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/electrical+energy\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">electrical energy<\/a>. There are many methods of electric propulsion, many of which require electrodes to apply a current, increasing thruster cost and complexity.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast the Helicon Plasma Thruster uses high power radio frequency waves to excite the propellant into a plasma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A test firing of Europe\u2019s Helicon Plasma Thruster, developed with ESA by SENER and the Universidad Carlos III\u2019s Plasma &amp; Space Propulsion Team (EP2-UC3M) in Spain. This compact, electrodeless and low voltage design is ideal for the propulsion of small satellites, including maintaining the formation of large orbital constellations. While traditional chemical propulsion have fundamental [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1497,2028],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-energy","category-satellites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}