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Hall Thrusters Could Be Key to Mars Exploration

With NASA’s renewed interest in returning to Mars, the need for advanced technologies has increased. Now, a team at U-M has discovered that Hall thrusters can generate more thrust at smaller sizes — making them a viable option to explore the Martian planet. Learn about the challenges and benefits of Hall thrusters with this video.

“People had previously thought that you could only push a certain amount of current through a thruster area, which in turn translates directly into how much force or thrust you can generate per unit area,” said Benjamin Jorns  , U-M associate professor of aerospace engineering.

Topics:
Aerospace Propulsion

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:00 NASA has expressed a renewed interest in going  back to Mars and they are at a crossroads right   now where they're trying to figure out the  technologies that are going to take us there. The challenge with using existing  Hall thrusters following existing   design rules is that if you scale up to 100  kilowatts your thruster becomes too massive.   Any benefits you gain in thrust increase  are nullified by the increase in mass. We were able to take a hall thruster that  was designed for 9 kilowatts and run it   up to 45 kilowatts. The traditional limit was,  we thought, a physics space limit and it turns   out that that doesn't really exist so what  remains are mostly engineering challenges. We're hoping that with some more work we're  planning to use a thruster of this size to   actually reach 100 kilowatts. What our work  has shown is that Hall thrusters may be able  

    00:01:17 to achieve comparable thrust and power  densities, which means that some of the   disadvantages traditionally associated  with them are starting to disappear. So it makes it kind of an actual viable  candidate to use this type of technology   to get to places like Mars with a crude mission.  While we've made substantial steps recently in   demonstrating we can make that specific mass very  low the power supply remains an open question,   now will that be solar? Will that be nuclear?  And that needs to be solved in parallel with   the work we're doing here to really make  these types of rapid transits possible.