Scientists Demonstrate a Novel Rocket for Deep-Space Exploration
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Scientists demonstrate a novel rocket for deep-space exploration:
The growing interest in deep-space exploration has sparked the need for powerful long-lived rocket systems to drive spacecraft through the cosmos. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have now developed a tiny modified version of a plasma-based propulsion system called a Hall thruster that both increases the lifetime of the rocket and produces high power.
[...] The new device helps overcome the problem for wall-less Hall thrusters that allows the plasma propellant to shoot from the rocket at wide angles, contributing little to the rocket's thrust. "In short, wall-less Hall thrusters while promising have an unfocused plume because of the lack of channel walls," Simmonds said. "So we needed to figure out a way to focus the plume to increase the thrust and efficiency and make it a better overall thruster for spacecraft."
[...] These developments increased the density of the thrust by shaping more of it in a reduced volume, a key goal for Hall thrusters. An added benefit of the segmented electrode has been the reduction of plasma instabilities called breathing mode oscillations, "where the amount of plasma increases and decreases periodically as the ionization rate changes with time" Simmonds said. Surprisingly, he added, the segmented electrode caused these oscillations to go away. "Segmented electrodes are very useful for Hall thrusters for these reasons," he said.
The new high-thrust-density rocket can be especially beneficial for tiny cubic satellites, or CubeSats. Masaaki Yamada, Simmonds' co-doctoral adviser who heads the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX) that studies the process behind solar flares, Northern lights and other space phenomena, proposed the use of a wall-less segmented electrode system to power a CubeSat. Simmonds and his team of undergraduate students working under the guidance of Prof. Daniel Marlow, the Evans Crawford 1911 Professor of Physics at Princeton, took up that proposal to develop a CubeSat and such a rocket -- a project that was halted near completion by the COVID-19 pandemic and that could be resumed in the future.
Journal Reference:
J. Simmonds, Y. Raitses. Mitigation of breathing oscillations and focusing of the plume in a segmented electrode wall-less Hall thruster, Applied Physics Letters (DOI: 10.1063/5.0070307)
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