NASA rocket engine runs 5+ years [View all]

[n2doc]

By JAKE ELLISON, SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF
Updated 4:54 pm, Wednesday, June 26, 2013



It's been blasting away since early 2008, a constant thrust for over 48,000 hours, and it's still ready for more, NASA says of its advance ion propulsion engine.

"We will voluntarily terminate this test at the end of this month, with the thruster fully operational. Life and performance have exceeded the requirements for any anticipated science mission," said Michael J. Patterson, principal investigator for NEXT at Glenn, in a press release.

The agency says:

The thruster was developed under NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) Project at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. Glenn manufactured the test engine's core ionization chamber. Aerojet Rocketdyne of Sacramento, Calif., designed and built the ion acceleration assembly. ...

The NEXT engine is a type of solar electric propulsion in which thruster systems use the electricity generated by the spacecraft's solar panel to accelerate the xenon propellant to speeds of up to 90,000 mph. This provides a dramatic improvement in performance compared to conventional chemical rocket engines.

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