New Dawn for Electric Rockets - Princeton University.pdf

SPACE TECHNOLOGY New Dawn for KEY CONCEPTS Efcient electric plasma engines are Conventional rockets propelling the next generation of space generate thrust by burning probes to the outer solar system By Edgar Y. Choueiri chemical fuel. Electric rockets propel space vehicles by applying electric or electromagnetic elds to clouds of charged lone amid the cosmic blackness, NASA’s ing liquid or solid chemical fuels, as convention- particles, or plasmas, to Dawn space probe speeds beyond the al rockets do. accelerate them. Aorbit of Mars toward the asteroid belt. Dawn’s mission designers at the NASA Jet Launched to search for insights into the birth of Propulsion Laboratory selected a plasma engine Although electric rockets offer much lower thrust the solar system, the robotic spacecraft is on its as the probe’s rocket system because it is highly levels than their chemical way to study the asteroids Vesta and Ceres, two efcient, requiring only one tenth of the fuel cousins, they can even- of the largest remnants of the planetary embry- that a chemical rocket motor would have need- tually enable spacecraft os that collided and combined some 4.57 billion ed to reach the asteroid belt. If project planners to reach greater speeds years ago to form today’s planets. had chosen to install a traditional engine, the for the same amount But the goals of the mission are not all that vehicle would have been able to reach either of propellant. make this ight notable. Dawn, which took off Vesta or Ceres, but