Their gentle, continuous push produces astounding speeds, using only tiny sips of xenon fuel.
Inside cavernous “Tank 5,” a vacuum chamber as big as a subway tunnel at Cleveland’s NASA Glenn Research Center, a soft sapphire glow spilled from the nozzle of an odd-looking spacecraft engine earlier this month.
The turquoise plume was a familiar sight to the engineers running the test. Ion engines, which spout bluish jets of electrically excited atoms rather than chemical flames like a traditional rocket, have been a Glenn specialty for more than 40 years. Their gentle, continuous push produces astounding speeds, using only tiny sips of xenon fuel.
A Glenn-designed ion engine enabled NASA’s Deep Space 1 probe to swoop past a distant comet for a close-up look in 2001. And the Glenn ion-powered Dawn spacecraft is 260 million miles from Earth, streaking toward a flyby of the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015 and breaking Deep Space 1’s acceleration record along the way.
But the most audacious assignment for the Cleveland center’s ion engines is ahead, as NASA revealed April 10.
Later this decade, a robot spacecraft riding a Glenn engine’s cobalt ion stream will aim for an asteroid circling a million or so miles from Earth. It will nuzzle up to the tumbling, dump truck-sized rock, unfurl a fabric grab-bag to snare it like a Venus flytrap, then fire up the ion engines and haul the asteroid into orbit around the moon.
There, as early as 2021, astronauts will dock with the captive space boulder. They’ll chip off chunks for study and possibly extract water and valuable minerals.
The White House-backed asteroid-lassoing mission sets a clear near-term space exploration goal for an agency that critics said had been floundering since the retirement of the shuttle fleet and President Barack Obama’s 2010 cancellation of NASA’s Constellation moon-landing program.
If Congress goes along, the asteroid-capture effort will mark the first time humans try to alter the path of a celestial body – a crucial step, NASA says, in learning how to deflect much bigger “planet-killer” asteroids and comets. The space agency also touts the project as a testbed for technologies needed to reach deeper-space destinations such as Mars, a boost for commercial and international partnerships, and a chance to mine asteroids for rocket fuel ingredients, precious minerals and other hidden resources.
It also raises the fortunes of Cleveland’s NASA center within the space agency. “The president wants us to put an astronaut on an asteroid by 2025 and here Glenn is right in the middle of that,” said center director James Free. “The work we do is very unique. Glenn has the technology this agency needs to move forward.”
NASA plans to pump $38 million into the Cleveland center in 2014 to speed up development of the more powerful ion engines needed for the asteroid-capture mission. The technology is formally called solar-electric propulsion, or SEP, because it uses the sun’s energy, collected by solar panels, to generate the electricity required to make and expel ions to push the spacecraft. While chemical rockets are more powerful, ion engines are far more efficient, making them the practical choice for such a long-distance flight.
In December, a small team of Glenn engineers quietly began planning the work the center will undertake as it leads the effort to accelerate SEP for the asteroid-capture mission. Making the necessary improvements will be “very challenging,” but achievable, Free said.
The most powerful ion engines currently flying on commercial satellites operate on about 25 kilowatts of electricity, or roughly 250 times the energy needed to make a household light bulb glow. To snag a million-pound asteroid and push it into lunar orbit will take a 50-kilowatt power system, plus large, extremely lightweight solar panels; compact, reliable power-processing equipment to manage the high electrical loads; and thrusters that withstand weeks or months of firing during the multi-year flight.
“It’s taking that junior SEP system and cranking it up,” Free said.
Working closely with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the Glenn team aims to build and test prototype “engineering models” of the propulsion components in 2014.
The Latest Bing News on:
Asteroid-snaring mission
- Curious asteroid Selam, spotted by NASA's Lucy spacecraft, is a cosmic toddleron May 1, 2024 at 5:00 pm
Selam may actually be younger than Lucy's namesake, the 3.2-million-year-old human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s. When NASA's Lucy mission passed by the near-Earth asteroid ...
- Scientists say they’ve traced the origins of a potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroid to the far side of the moonon May 1, 2024 at 12:29 pm
Rare near-Earth asteroid Kamo’oalewa may have been created several million years ago when something slammed into the moon and sent a chunk of it flying into space.
- This spacecraft is headed to NASA's asteroid-crash aftermath — but first, it'll stop by Marson April 30, 2024 at 9:00 am
After Hera speeds past Mars, it's onward to Didymos and its now -misshapen companion Dimorphos (thanks to the collision), where the spacecraft will gather information on the asteroid to better ...
- Killer Asteroid Hunters Spot 27,500 Overlooked Space Rockson April 30, 2024 at 6:00 am
With the help of Google Cloud, scientists churned through hundreds of thousands of images of the night sky to reveal that the solar system is filled with unseen objects.
- How Scientists Are Preparing for Apophis's Unnervingly Close Brush With Earthon April 24, 2024 at 5:00 pm
During a recent workshop at a European Space Agency center in The Netherlands, the companies pitched their mission concepts in an effort to learn more about the asteroid and other space rocks that ...
- Minerals are in short supply on Earth. This startup wants to mine asteroidson April 23, 2024 at 1:13 am
(Gialich declined to specify which asteroid the company is targeting.) If this mission succeeds, it will make AstroForge the first commercial company to venture into deep space, it says.
- Companies offer proposals for Apophis asteroid missionson April 22, 2024 at 4:59 pm
NASA has already agreed to send one mission to Apophis, using the main spacecraft for the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission. That mission, rechristened OSIRIS-APEX, will rendezvous with ...
- You can watch an asteroid pass Earth this weekon April 15, 2024 at 12:36 pm
If you buy through a BGR link, we may earn an affiliate commission, helping support our expert product labs. A 2,000-foot-long asteroid stormed past Earth this morning. The asteroid in question is ...
- Car-size asteroid discovered 2 days ago flies by Earth at 1/30th the distance of the moonon April 10, 2024 at 5:00 pm
Can we stop them in time? —Boulders flung from NASA's asteroid-smashing DART mission could crash into Mars, study predicts —'Potentially hazardous' asteroid Bennu contains the building blocks ...
- Debris From NASA Asteroid Collision May Hit Marson April 9, 2024 at 10:28 am
NASA/ ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS Dimorphos is 525 feet in diameter, and orbits a larger, 2,560-foot asteroid known as Didymos. The DART mission was designed to test how slamming a spacecraft into ...
The Latest Google Headlines on:
Asteroid-snaring mission
[google_news title=”” keyword=”asteroid-snaring mission” num_posts=”10″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”] [/vc_column_text]The Latest Bing News on:
Ion engines
- The Risks of Charging Your E-Bike or E-Scooter Inside Your Home or Apartmenton May 14, 2024 at 4:00 am
While battery packs and lithium-ion cells are rigorously tested to meet safety standards, it’s important to be aware of the safety risks and learn what can be avoided.
- SEAT Leon Rolls Out With New Engines And Revamped Interior For 2024on May 13, 2024 at 9:03 am
The SEAT Leon receives significant upgrades with new 1.5 TSI and eHybrid engines, alongside advanced interior tech enhancements, including larger HMI screens.
- Florence Ionon May 8, 2024 at 5:00 pm
Ready for Google's annual declaration of new things? Here's how to watch the keynotes and sessions. Apple Shortcuts lets you program a similar feature, and you can even assign it a gesture. New ...
- Old Bike, New Battery: What Could Go Wrong? [EBL Li-Ion Test]on May 2, 2024 at 2:30 pm
Since the EBL battery contains no acid and is completely sealed, potential damage to your bike from cell leakage is unlikely. There is no danger of spillage, no need to worry about battery cell fluid ...
- To lower emissions, a Minnesota startup wants to convert diesel engines to burn ammoniaon May 1, 2024 at 4:59 am
Ammonia doesn’t emit carbon dioxide when burned, but its energy-intensive production mostly relies on fossil fuels.
- Sodium-ion batteries from Michigan plant to challenge lithium’s gripon April 29, 2024 at 11:22 am
Natron Energy Inc. bills the facility near the Lake Michigan shore as the first full-scale U.S. plant for making sodium-ion batteries.
- Lithium-ion vs lithium-polymer batteries: What's the difference?on April 27, 2024 at 5:00 pm
Lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery technology has historically been the power cell of choice for smartphones and a wide range of other portable gadgets too. However, modern smartphones now commonly ...
- 2004 Saturn Ionon April 16, 2024 at 5:01 pm
The majority of our panel gave the Ion Red Line, which is on sale now, a thumbs-up rating. The Red Line brand name refers to a vehicle’s tachometer, which counts the number of engine revolutions ...
The Latest Google Headlines on:
Ion engines
[google_news title=”” keyword=”ion engines” num_posts=”10″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]