{"id":27577,"date":"2016-07-08T00:41:58","date_gmt":"2016-07-08T07:41:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/this-innovation-could-change-space-travel-forever"},"modified":"2017-06-04T19:53:59","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T02:53:59","slug":"this-innovation-could-change-space-travel-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/this-innovation-could-change-space-travel-forever","title":{"rendered":"This innovation could change space travel forever"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

While there are several forms<\/a> of ion propulsion, the version Brophy used on Dawn involves two grids, each about a foot wide and spaced half a millimeter apart. An electrical system powered by a solar array on the spacecraft passes a current through both grids, and the resulting voltage differential between the two is what accelerates the xenon particles as they pass through the grids. Each accelerating particle only provides a tiny amount of thrust \u2014 roughly equivalent<\/a> to the pressure of a piece of paper lying in your hand \u2014 but in the airless and frictionless environment of space, a steady stream of that tiny thrust can build up to monumental speeds of about 24,000 miles-per-hour.<\/p>\n

What Brophy and his coworkers aimed to do was build a grid and propulsion system that could pull this off, and demonstrate that the setup was durable enough to survive the whole mission. So before both Deep Space 1 and Dawn, they ran versions of the ion system here on Earth continuously for years to demonstrate their lifespan.<\/p>\n

Finally, the Dawn mission became possible when Ceres and Vesta reached a once-every-17-years alignment, allowing the mission to visit them both. \u201cThat was really a great boon for space exploration to do the two largest asteroids in the asteroid belt with one mission,\u201d Russell explains.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While there are several forms of ion propulsion, the version Brophy used on Dawn involves two grids, each about a foot wide and spaced half a millimeter apart. An electrical system powered by a solar array on the spacecraft passes a current through both grids, and the resulting voltage differential between the two is what [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":362,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27577","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\/362"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27577"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67004,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27577\/revisions\/67004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}