Radio frequency mini ion engines for fine attitude control and formation flying applications

Abstract

Many of ESA’s and NASA’s future missions are based on Formation flying, Fine attitude control and (fine) Drag compensation. As prominent examples one could mention LISA, DARWIN, PROBA-III, etc. For all these applications there is a need for propulsion system with:

- High thrust accuracy and
- High thrust controllability

Taking into account, that up to 16 of these thrusters are needed for every space craft, there would be other requirements necessary:

- Low mass,
- High ISP,
- Low power consumption

All these requirements combined with high mission durations of up to 10 years, which enforce a life time of over 20,000hrs show the challenges, which the thruster and system designers are confronted with. University of Giessen started 2004 the works on micro Newton ion thrusters based on Radio frequency discharge. The works leaded to a miniaturized RF ion source with very low power consumption and mass, which is under industrialization to higher TR Levels under ESA contracts. The performance of such a small thruster will be presented in this paper. From the other side the whole system architecture for such a propulsion system will be discussed.

More information

Identifiers

Catalogue record

Export record