Is gravity getting your satellite down? Too bad it doesn’t have a Mini-Helicon Plasma Thruster on board.

The aeronautics minds at MIT have developed this new propulsion system as a lighter, more fuel-efficient way to give satellites the boost they need.

Powered by electrically charged nitrogen gas, the Mini-Helicon is an alternative to the rockets maneuvering most satellites today, which get their kick from chemical reactions. About 10 times more efficient, this new, shoebox-sized technology would also have the advantage of being significantly cheaper, Oleg Batishchev, a principal research scientist in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, said in a press release.

Mini-Helicon follows in the footsteps of plasma and ion thrusters tested on a handful of earlier satellites, including Deep Space 1, Japan’s Hayabusa and the Dawn mission to asteroids Ceres and Vesta.

It is based on a more powerful and heftier version of the technology, the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, or VASIMR, developed by former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz. VASIMR is intended as a propulsion system for space cargo and long-distance space flight, and is planned for NASA testing aboard the International Space Station in 2012.

The Mini-Helicon Plasma Thruster is the first of these non-chemical technologies to use nitrogen as its fuel source. The nitrogen is pumped through a quartz tube wrapped in a coiled antenna and surrounded by magnets. Radio frequency power, transmitted to the nitrogen from the antenna, turns the gas into plasma, or electrically charged gas. The magnets help produce the plasma, and guide and accelerate it through the system.

"The plasma beam exhausted from the tube is what gives us the thrust to propel the rocket," Batishchev said.

Last summer, for fun, Batishchev’s students successfully assembled a version of the plasma rocket using a recycled glass bottle and aluminum can, instead of the quartz tube and radio-frequency antenna (see video). "This shows that this is a robust, simple design. So in principal, an even simpler design could be developed," he said.

Still, the technology is very young, and it will likely many years before it can be used commercially.

— Elise Kleeman for Wired.com

Image: A prototype of the Mini-Helicon Plasma Thruster. Donna Coveney/MIT

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