A 40000 km/h less than a litre of fuel
Baku, April 5 (AZERTAC). Imagine that you reach the Moon using only a fraction of a litre of fuel. With the ion engine, MicroThrust, scientists of the ` École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and other European partners are going to realize this dream, ushering in a new era of low-cost space exploration. A complete engine, miniaturized and designed for small satellites (1-100 kg), that will allow them to change their orbit around the Earth and even journeys with more distant destinations.
Specifically, the engine is designed to be mounted on very small satellites as is extremely compact, but highly efficient. You think the prototype weighs only 200 grams. “At the moment, the nanosatelliti are stuck in their orbits. Our goal is to make it free”, explains Herbert Shea, European project coordinator and Director of the laboratory MicroThrust of spatial technologies EPFL Microsystems.
The engine developed by EPFL, the flow of ions emitted by an array of small Silicon nozzles - In addition 1.000 per square centimeter. The fuel is first driven by capillary action from a tank at the end of the ` micro-nozzles, where the ions are extracted by an electrode to 1000 volt, accelerated, and finally issued from the back of the satellite. The polarity of the electric field reverses every second, so that all positive and negative ions can be expelled. The speeds are really prominent even if we are talking about very low accelerations. Suffice to say that if we were to compare the performance of a ` car, The comparison goes from MicroThrust 0 at 100 km/h in 77 hours. But as we all know in space time is relative. Thanks to the almost total lack of friction, over time these accelerations very weak result in final cruise velocity really considerable. After 6 months would indeed by speed 24.000 km/h, initial launch speed, ben 40.000 km/h.km/h
The first ion will light up behind micromotor CleanSpace One - a nanosatellite whose mission is to real space scavengers, that will grab debris in attracting ` atmosphere in order to incinerate them safely. According to the Swiss space centre, CleanSpace One will have two or three months and more than 1.000 Earth revolutions to reach one of its objectives, the decommissioned Swisscube cubesat or Tlsat-1 cubesat. Scientists have little more than a year to complete their system.
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