Thrustor size, beam current level, and specific impulse tradeoffs are considered for mercury electron bombardment ion thrustors to be used for north-south station keeping of geosynchronous spacecraft. An 8-cm-diam thrustor operating at 2750 sec specific impulse at thrust levels of 4.4 mN (1 mlb) to 8.9 mN (2 mlb) with a design life of 20,000 hours and 10,000 cycles is being developed. The thrustor will have a dished two-grid system capable of thrust vectoring of plus or minus 10 deg in two orthogonal directions. A preliminary thrustor has been fabricated and tested; thrustor performance characteristics have been determined at 4.45, 6.68, and 8.90 millinewtons.
An 8-cm electron bombardment thruster for auxiliary propulsion
Electric Propulsion Conference ; 1973 ; Lake Tahoe, NV
1973-10-01
Conference paper
No indication
English
Electron bombardment thruster technology
AIAA | 1969
|Mercury electron bombardment thruster system
AIAA | 1967
|