{"id":156182,"date":"2023-01-24T21:26:38","date_gmt":"2023-01-25T03:26:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/plasma-thrusters-used-on-satellites-could-be-much-more-powerful-than-previously-believed"},"modified":"2023-01-24T21:26:38","modified_gmt":"2023-01-25T03:26:38","slug":"plasma-thrusters-used-on-satellites-could-be-much-more-powerful-than-previously-believed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/plasma-thrusters-used-on-satellites-could-be-much-more-powerful-than-previously-believed","title":{"rendered":"Plasma thrusters used on satellites could be much more powerful than previously believed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/jM_wcsTQxek?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>It has been believed that Hall thrusters, an efficient kind of electric propulsion widely used in orbit, must be large to produce a lot of thrust. Now, a new study from the University of Michigan suggests that smaller Hall thrusters can generate much more thrust\u2014potentially making them candidates for interplanetary missions.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPeople had previously thought that you could only push a certain amount of current through a thruster area, which in turn translates directly into how much force or thrust you can generate per unit area,\u201d said Benjamin Jorns, U-M associate professor of <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/aerospace+engineering\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">aerospace engineering<\/a> who led the new Hall thruster study to be presented at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aiaa.org\/SciTech\">AIAA SciTech Forum<\/a> in National Harbor, Maryland, today.<\/p>\n<p>His team challenged this limit by running a 9 kilowatt Hall thruster up to 45 kilowatts, maintaining roughly 80% of its nominal efficiency. This increased the amount of force generated per unit area by almost a factor of 10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It has been believed that Hall thrusters, an efficient kind of electric propulsion widely used in orbit, must be large to produce a lot of thrust. Now, a new study from the University of Michigan suggests that smaller Hall thrusters can generate much more thrust\u2014potentially making them candidates for interplanetary missions. \u201cPeople had previously thought [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2028],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-satellites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156182","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\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}