Penny-Sized Rocket Thruster to Propel Small Satellites

A new microthruster - designed by Paulo Lozano, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT - bears little resemblance to today's bulky satellite engines, which are laden with valves, pipes, and heavy propellant tanks. Instead, Lozano's design is a flat, compact square - much like a computer chip - covered with 500 microscopic tips that, when stimulated with voltage, emit tiny beams of ions. Together, the array of spiky tips creates a small puff of charged particles that can help propel a shoebox-sized satellite forward.

Transcript

00:00:00 We live in a great age of discovery. We're learning so many things about our universe. We're learning so many things about the planets, and so on. But for that, we need to take big spacecraft and look at things up close. Nowadays, people-- especially universities-- are looking into launching really small spacecraft, spacecraft as small as this little cube I have here. So if you want to launch something like this,

00:00:30 it's cheap, but then it's very limited what you can do with it. So you need, for example, an engine that can make these run from one place to another. At MIT, that's specifically what we're working on. We're trying to produce a propulsion system that we could put in a little cube like this and make it move the way a big satellite does. We have built a magnetic levitation system that levitates a small satellite inside a vacuum

00:00:56 chamber. This vacuum chamber is used to simulate all the aspects of space. This magnetic levitation system works by running a controller that fixes the position of the satellite vertically. This is done using an electromagnet and some magnets attached to the satellite. Once a satellite is floating inside this chamber, the thrusters that are attached to this satellite

00:01:17 are going to be fired. Afterwards, the motion is going to be analyzed, and direct measurements of this thrust are going to be calculated. These measurements are important, because they prepare the system for an actual flight. So our thrusters are micromachines, using exactly the same kind of tools that are used in machine electronics-- microelectronics components.

00:01:40 In this way, we can make them really, really small. So the components inside the thruster are just a few microns in size, and that allow us to package everything in a very, very compact structure. Each one of these is able to move one of those cubes in space the same way that a bigger engine can move a bigger spacecraft, a bigger engine like that one at my back. So this is a very exciting kind of thing,

00:02:05 and hopefully it will help us to launch more missions and make more discoveries in the years ahead.