Ground-Based Experiment for Electric Propulsion Thruster Plume—Magnetic Field Interaction

Electric space propulsion is a technology which employed on continuously increasing number of spacecrafts. While the current focus their application area telecommunication satellites and exploration missions, several new ideas are now discussed that go even further apply thruster plume particle flow for transferring momentum to targets such as debris objects or asteroids. In these potential scenarios, beam impacts distant subsequently generates changes in flight path. One aspect so far has not been systematically investigated interaction charged particles with magnetic fields present space. This may result deflection consequently affect aiming strategy. article, basic considerations related between electric plumes presented. Experiments respect questions were conducted high-vacuum test facility thrusters (STG-ET) German Aerospace Center Göttingen utilizing gridded ion thruster, an RIT10/37, Helmholtz coil generate varying field strength. It was possible detect RIT caused by Earth-like