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.


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    Title :

    An 8-cm electron bombardment thruster for auxiliary propulsion


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    Electric Propulsion Conference ; 1973 ; Lake Tahoe, NV


    Publication date :

    1973-10-01


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English






    An 8-cm electron bombardment thruster for auxiliary propulsion

    Hudson, W. R. / Banks, B. A. | NTRS | 1973


    Electron bombardment thruster technology

    FORRESTER, A. / GOLDIN, D. / LEAR, C. | AIAA | 1969