The US Air Force's most public secret, the X-37B unmanned spaceplane, is now a little less top secret. The Air Force has revealed that when the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) 4 mission lifts off from Cape ...

Hall thrusters are an efficient kind of electric propulsion used in orbit, and they need to be large to produce a lot of thrust. Things are going to change with the new study from the University of ...

Hall thrusters (HTs) are used in earth-orbiting satellites, and also show promise to propel robotic spacecraft long distances, such as from Earth to Mars. The propellant in a HT, usually xenon, is ...

BOSTON — A small Massachusetts firm is hoping that an experimental satellite launched for the U.S. Air Force last month will open the doors to widespread adoption of their thruster technology and a ...

French Prime Minister Jean Castex, Frédérique Vidal, French research and innovation minister, and Bruno le Maire, French economy and finance minister, are shown holding the ExoMG Hall-effect thruster ...

Hall thrusters are a type of electric propulsion machine that obtains thrust by ionizing propellants such as xenon and krypton and discharging the generated ions with a magnetic field. It was invented ...

To prolong the lifespan of Hall thrusters, scientists have experimentally optimized the operation of a novel, wall-less thruster prototype developed a year ago by the same team. The preliminary ...

The X3 Nested-channel Hall Thruster (NHT), is a 100-kW class thruster developed jointly by the Plasmadynamics and Electric Propulsion Laboratory (PEPL) at the University of Michigan, led by Alec ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. The U.S. Air Force will test an innovative spacecraft thruster this month when it launches the ...