True Blue: High-Power Propulsion for Gateway
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Cerebral Overload
Cerebral Overload
The blue hue of the Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) is seen inside a vacuum chamber at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland during recent thruster qualification testing. This 12-kilowatt Hall thruster is the most powerful electric propulsion thruster in production, and it will be critical to future science and exploration missions at the Moon and beyond. The blue plume is a steady stream of ionized xenon gas ejected to produce low, highly efficient thrust. These electric propulsion systems accelerate spacecraft to extremely high speeds over time using only a fraction of the fue…