Sentences with phrase «ion engine»

In gaining fuel efficiency, ion engines sacrifice thrust, the ability to deliver strong acceleration.

This is the first time ion engines have been used to send a spacecraft into orbit around a distant object in the solar system.

The Europeans seem more committed to the technology: ESA's upcoming unmanned Mercury craft, BeppiColombo, will use ion engines too.

Mature electric propulsion devices such as ion engines, hall thrusters and magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters have electrodes exposed to the plasmas.

Founded in 2014 by MIT engineers Natalya Brikner and Louis Perna, this small satellite startup develops miniature ion engines for more efficient space propulsion.

Russell got interested in ion engines in 1992, when he met Scott Benson, an engineer at NASA's Lewis Research Center in Cleveland (now the Glenn Research Center), who had recently begun experimenting with ion propulsion.

Ion engines work by stripping electrons from the atoms of an inert gas such as xenon, making them positively charged.

As the spacecraft's ion engines slowly push it toward Ceres, the dwarf planet's details are now coming into focus, revealing tantalizing new details with practically every new image.

A typical ion engine provides 10 times the specific impulse of a conventional solid - fuel booster (specific impulse can be thought of as a spaceship's miles - per - gallon rating).

Now that Hayabusa in effect has two working ion engines again, it is back on track to return to Earth in June 2010, as had been planned before the 4 November glitch, JAXA says.

But the steady, gentle thrust of Dawn's ion engines allowed flight engineers to program a trajectory for the probe that gradually matched Vesta's path around the sun.

The Dawn spacecraft used an efficient ion engine to visit Vesta (left) and Ceres (right) in this artist's rendering.

Propulsion: Solar - electric propulsion using three gimballed NSTAR ion engines and monopropellant reaction control system.

A few years back, NASA sponsored a study for the Innovative Interstellar Explorer, which would use a beefed - up version of the ion engine on the current Dawn spacecraft to dip into the near edge of interstellar space.

Deep Space 1, an engineering test mission launched by NASA in 1998, demonstrated that an ion engine could be used to move around the solar system.

In fact, NASA had explored the technology as far back as the 1960s but lost interest as the agency's focus shifted to the space shuttle; ion engines had been developed only to make minor adjustments in the paths of Earth - orbiting satellites.

What makes Dawn's mission possible is a type of propulsion known as an ion engine.

With Benson he spent two years on a sequel of sorts, a lunar orbiter that used an ion engine, but the idea was passed over.

Dawn's ion engine, by contrast, has to accelerate the spacecraft continuously for months on end, spiraling outward until its trajectory matches Vesta's orbit.

The thrust from each of Dawn's three ion engines is minuscule, a force equivalent to that of the weight of a piece of paper resting on the palm of your hand.

The beleaguered Hayabusa asteroid probe is back on track to return to Earth after a clever workaround coaxed one of its ion engines back to life.

But Hayabusa has been hobbling home without the full use of its four ion engines, which ionise xenon gas and then use electric fields to accelerate the ions, providing a steady — though weak — thrust.

is so tiny that billions of single - ion engines would be needed to generate useful power.

Singer says it could be potentially tapped to drive a tiny electrical generator, although the amount involved — about 10 - 24 joules per cycle — is so tiny that billions of single - ion engines would be needed to generate useful power.

Peter Steeneken, a physicist at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, says the German group provides «convincing evidence» for having built a single - ion engine.

The spacecraft's ion engines will bring it to a capture orbit around this 590 mile diameter dwarf planet on March 6th, 2015 — at a distance some 2.5 times further from the Sun than the Earth.

Ion exhaust is much faster than the exhaust from a chemical rocket, so an ion engine can produce 10 times as much thrust from each pound of fuel.

NASA tried an ion engine once, on its experimental Deep Space 1 probe, but never followed up.

Beaming Up to Vesta The ion engines that powered Dawn 1.7 billion miles to Vesta were once confined to science fiction (see the iconic Twin Ion Engine [TIE] fighters from Star Wars).

In science fiction such feats of interplanetary space navigation are routine, but the maneuver has never before been attempted in the real world — and it would be impossible without the ion engines.

In early December the Hayabusa team restarted the probe's ion engine to begin the 180 - million - mile journey home.

The purpose of the HAYABUSA mission is sample return from the Itokawa by traveling through space using an ion engine and arriving at the asteroid autonomously to acquire a material sample.

HAYABUSA is traveling through space using an ion engine.

HAYABUSA employs a new technology - the ion engine.

It's no TIE fighter, but the Dawn probe is driven by the future of spacecraft propulsion: ion engines.

This two - stop tour of our solar system is made possible by Dawn's ion propulsion system, its three ion engines being much more efficient than chemical propulsion.

Since its capture by the gravity of dwarf planet Ceres on March 6, NASA's Dawn spacecraft has performed flawlessly, continuing to thrust with its ion engine as planned.

Instead we want to be the ion engine for your portfolio.