When it comes to space exploration, large vehicles get most of the press -- but a team on KickStarter wants to build an engine that could power nanoscale satellites on their own journeys of ...

What do scanning electron microscopes and satellites have in common? On the face of things, not much, but after seeing [Zachary Tong]’s latest video on liquid metal ion thrusters, we see that they ...

Rockets might be fiery fun, but they’re big, bulky, and heavy. Ion thrusters, sci-fi as they sound, are real and these penny-sized ones are probably the future of steering small satellites in orbit.

LOGAN, Utah–Water-based thruster specialist Pale Blue plans to demonstrate an ion thruster in early 2025. The Japanese company has delivered its water-based ion thruster demonstrator to the Japan ...

BepiColombo, the joint ESA/JAXA spacecraft on a mission to Mercury, is now firing its thrusters for the first time in flight. On Sunday, BepiColombo carried out the first successful manoeuver using ...

In 2018, Elon Musk put a Tesla in space. Like many of the billionaire’s antics, it was a publicity stunt. However, it pointed to an undeniable truth: the future of space travel is electric. Most ...

The European Space Agency and the Australian National University have successfully tested a new design of spacecraft ion engine that dramatically improves performance over present thrusters and marks ...

Pale Blue was awarded grants worth up to $27 million from Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) to develop miniature water-based ion and Hall-effect thrusters ...

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 rendezvous with the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche is scheduled for 2029. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Breaking space news, the ...