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Preliminary Design of ECR Ion Thruster  

Kim, Su-Kyum (한국항공우주연구원 위성열/추진팀)
Yu, Myoung-Jong (한국항공우주연구원 위성기술실)
Choi, Seung-Woon (한국항공우주연구원 위성전자팀)
Publication Information
Aerospace Engineering and Technology / v.9, no.2, 2010 , pp. 14-21 More about this Journal
Abstract
Ion thruster is a kind of electrostatic thruster that use electrostatic field in order to accelerate ionized propellant. Ion thruster have characteristics of small thrust but very high specific impulse among the electric thrusters. High specific impulse can reduce propellant consumption significantly. So, ion thruster have advantage for long time and long distance mission. Recently, plans for space exploration is increasing gradually not only at traditional forward countries for space like USA, Russia and Europe, but also other countries like Japan, China and India. Exploration for superior planets and asteroids the propellant ratio can go up to about 99% when chemical propulsion is used as a cruising thruster. Therefore, latest space exploration vehicles use the ion thruster as main thruster for del-V burn and use monopropellant thrusters for attitude control. In this paper, the development process of preliminary ECR ion thruster and the ECR discharge test results will be presented.
Keywords
electric propulsion; ion thruster; plasma; ECR, electron cyclotron resonance;
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