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 ...

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 ...

Hall thrusters utilise electric propulsion through the ionisation and acceleration of plasma under crossed electric and magnetic fields, offering efficient and reliable performance for spacecraft.

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 ...

A Hall thruster is powering many of the satellites moving around Earth right now. It needs 100 million (yes, you read that right, 100 million) times less fuel than chemical thrusters. But it was never ...