| Project Detail |
New magnetic thruster concept exploits the mechanism behind solar flares
High-efficiency electric thrusters are fundamental for deep space planetary missions to Moon, Mars, Jupiter and beyond. Further performance improvements rely on scaling up the design of ion thrusters, but this adds to spacecraft size and weight. Funded by the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme, the MaRe-HCT project aims to overcome this challenge by developing a novel thruster whose main acceleration mechanism will be based on magnetic reconnection. Magnetic reconnection occurs in solar flares, Earth’s magnetosphere and laboratory plasmas; the magnetic topology is rearranged, and magnetic energy is converted to kinetic energy, thermal energy and particle acceleration. With the proposed acceleration mechanism, electric thrusters could attain a specific impulse value of 50 000 s, at least one order of magnitude higher than those achieved by state-of-the-art propulsion systems. |
