Enabling Low-Cost High-Energy Missions with Small Spacecraft by Using Pulsed Plasma Thrusters (original) (raw)

Pulsed Plasma Thrusters (PPTs) were the first Electric Propulsion devices ever to be employed in an actual space mission, and continue to be used today when simplicity, robustness and scalability to different power levels are dominant requirements. Therefore, they find a natural niche of application in small-spacecraft missions, where mass, volume and onboard power are at a premium, in spite of their low overall efficiency and not fully understood physical operating principles. While PPTs have drawn renewed attention from the international space community after a long hiatus, this has been generally limited, until now, to low Delta-V, low total impulse missions. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of performing high Delta-v, high total impulse missions, such as orbit raising or even deep-space missions, using PPTs onboard small spacecraft.