Ion Engine Enters Space Race

Gorgeous

17th April 2008 - 04:12 PM

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7346789.stm

g.

CTYankee

19th April 2008 - 01:44 PM

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has an ion engine, it was launched on September 27, 2007.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/spacecraft/index.html

guiding_light

19th April 2008 - 06:21 PM

The first time I heard about ion engines was from the first Star Wars movie, since the evil Empire used them in their fleet.

I think 'ion engine' is a bad name. Something like 'plasma engine' may be more appropriate because both ions and electrons are being ejected.

The ions of course carry the momentum, but you also have to balance the charge. To avoid mis-impressions, you can say the momentum is carried by the plasma.

User posted image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ion_engine.svg

CTYankee

20th April 2008 - 12:54 PM

QUOTE (guiding_light+Apr 19 2008, 06:21 PM)

The first time I heard about ion engines was from the first Star Wars movie, since the evil Empire used them in their fleet.

I seemed to recall mention of Ion drives in the original Star Trek series. Yup, found a link, it's in the episode "Spock's Brain"

http://216.109.125.130/search/cache?ei=UTF...&icp=1&.intl=us

Enthalpy

25th April 2008 - 12:56 AM

Ion engines exist for decades.

The Soviet Union's spacecrafts used them on a regular basis. At that time and on that topic, they were 20-30 years ahead of US and W-Europe.

Many US and European satellites have been using ion engines for a decade more or less, for attitude control and often for orbit control.

Putting ion engines on interplanetary spacecrafts wasn't such a huge step. And I would rather say: the very long time it took to fill this particular gap to Sovietic technology is an indicator of how conservative space technology is.

Chromodynamix

4th May 2008 - 01:37 PM

The XIPS engines have been in operation some time.

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/X/XIPS.html

At the height of development it created a global shortage of Xenon gas, which is very rare.

As part of my work I wondered why there was a shortage and came up with this fanciful idea. A very old website

http://homepages.acenet.co.za/robsons/robsons.htm

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