China's new Ion thrusters

[Last starfighter]

China's New Space Station Is Powered by Ion Thrusters

• Victor Tangermann in Off World
• 
• China’s first module of its upcoming Tiangong space station makes use of ion drives, technology that could vastly cut down the time it takes to travel to Mars — and greatly reduce the amount of fuel needed to make that trip, as the South China Morning Post reports.
  
  The module, called Tianhe and launched in late April, is powered by four ion thrusters that use electricity to accelerate ions as a form of propulsion. In fact, the module could soon become the first spacecraft in history to transport humans using the technology, according to SCMP.
  
  Ion drives are orders of magnitude more efficient compared to chemical propulsion. To keep the International Space Station in orbit for a year, the thrusters consume four tons of rocket fuel. With ion thrusters, it’d need just 400 kilograms to stay in orbit for the same amount of time, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
  
  A trip to Mars could be cut down from eight months to just 39 days.
  
  China is betting big on ion thrusters, hoping to use them not just for its space station but for upcoming satellite constellations and nuclear-powered spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts to Mars as well, according to SCMP.
  
  The technology has been around for decades, but mainstream adoption has been hampered by the fact that the thrust produced isn’t very significant. Scaling up the thrusters could end up putting astronauts in danger and shorten the lifespan of satellites.
  
  But scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences may have cracked the code. One of its ion drives currently in development has been burning for more than 11 months straight, according to the newspaper.
  
  A magnetic field makes sure the particles don’t create any damage or erode the engine, while a special ceramic material stops it from getting damaged by radiation.
  
  “Space projects are usually very big,” an anonymous Beijing-based space scientist told SCMP. “A typical mission involves hundreds or even thousands of individuals. But the competition in space is essentially a competition over some very small but extremely important details.”
  
  “The ion thruster is one of those areas where the devil is in the detail,” the scientist added.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

China is betting big on ion thrusters, hoping to use them not just for its space station but for upcoming satellite constellations

Smart move!

Ion thrusters are powering a probe heading to Mercury launched in 2018.

BepiColombo - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Also Elon Musk's Starlink constellation is powered by ion thrusters.

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

Smart move!

Ion thrusters are powering a probe heading to Mercury launched in 2018.

BepiColombo - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Also Elon Musk's Starlink constellation is powered by ion thrusters.
View attachment 751237

Previous use of ion propulsion such as on Japan's Hayabusa meteor sample return probe are relatively small and weak. Chinese space station is the first one that uses large thrust ion thrusters and the first manned spacecraft certified to be powered by ion propulsion. Indeed, it is large thrust iron propulsion that will get humans to Mars.

 

[Han Patriot]

Previous use of ion propulsion such as on Japan's Hayabusa meteor sample return probe are relatively small and weak. Chinese space station is the first one that uses large thrust ion thrusters and the first manned spacecraft certified to be powered by ion propulsion. Indeed, it is large thrust iron propulsion that will get humans to Mars.

Hamartia won't know the difference, he is a cheerleader with pink pom poms. As long as China develops something revolutionary, he will barge in to

A) debunk or devalue it
B) tell US has it too and is more advanced.

 

[bshifter]

Hamartia won't know the difference, he is a cheerleader with pink pom poms. As long as China develops something revolutionary, he will barge in to

A) debunk or devalue it
B) tell US has it too and is more advanced.

That's what he does best. Most Americans are afterall silly people, luckily there are smart and intelligent ones around who will report things from a factual standpoint.

 

[Han Patriot]

That's what he does best. Most Americans are afterall silly people, luckily there are smart and intelligent ones around who will report things from a factual standpoint.

He is not White American, he is yindian

 

[ZeEa5KPul]

He is not White American, he is yindian

Nah, false-flagging Indians will always bring India into the topic somehow. I remember some clown recently with US flags saying "India beat China in 1967", whatever fantasy war they made up to deny the stomping they got in 1962. No American would say that, no American would even know it. "1962" to an American would probably conjure up the Cuban Missile Crisis, if anything.

@Hamartia Antidote doesn't bring up India, like any normal white American wouldn't, because it's beneath notice.

 

[bshifter]

Nah, false-flagging Indians will always bring India into the topic somehow. I remember some clown recently with US flags saying "India beat China in 1967", whatever fantasy war they made up to deny the stomping they got in 1962. No American would say that, no American would even know it. "1962" to an American would probably conjure up the Cuban Missile Crisis, if anything.

@Hamartia Antidote doesn't bring up India, like any normal white American wouldn't, because it's beneath notice.

He also looks down on India, no Indian view his own country like a nobody.

 

[Han Patriot]

He also looks down on India, no Indian view his own country like a nobody.

That's called reverse psychology. They would hit their own mum just to win an argument.

 

[ZeEa5KPul]

That's called reverse psychology. They would hit their own mum just to win an argument.

Jai Hinds aren't intelligent enough to do that. If he actually is one, he would be the first and only documented case of that (basic) level of intelligence and cunning found amongst the Jai Hinds.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

LOL! At the name calling by the half Indian/half Chinese Asian members in this thread.

Eh I'm sorry for the confusion both your Asian halves are just as bad..and you look exactly the same to me. So maybe I'll just call you Indians

I'll happily call both your Asian halves names all day if you want.

 

[Daniel808]

China's New Space Station Is Powered by Ion Thrusters

• View attachment 751216
• 
  
• In fact, the Tianhe module could soon become the first spacecraft in history to transport humans using the technology.
• The technology has been around for decades, but mainstream adoption has been hampered by the fact that the thrust produced isn’t very significant. Scaling up the thrusters could end up putting astronauts in danger and shorten the lifespan of satellites.
  
  But scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences may have cracked the code. One of its ion drives currently in development has been burning for more than 11 months straight, according to the newspaper.

Damn, Chinese you guys never stop to amaze the world

Using 4 big Ion Thrusters on their Space Station (CSS) is a clever and great idea

 

[Viva_Viet]

LOL! At the name calling by the half Indian/half Chinese Asian members in this thread.

Eh I'm sorry for the confusion both your Asian halves are just as bad..and you look exactly the same in my book.

I'll happily call both your Asian halves names all day if you want.

They are White lovers, their hearts will be broken when seeing white man dislike CN.

If someone hate CN, then thats must be VNese or Indian, daddy White and Jap always love CN

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

They are White lover, their hearts will be broken when seeing white man dislike CN.

If someone hate CN, then thats must be VNese or Indian, daddy White and Jap always love CN

View attachment 751279

View attachment 751280

LOL! I think they feel they deserve some respect...like South Korea or Japan..however they need to be developed a lot longer before that so they are still going to be bucketed lower with the Indians (and others) for the foreseeable future in the eyes of the West. It was typical here to say "eat all the food on your plate...don't you know there are starving people in China and Africa!!".

Calling somebody an Indian or Chinese is still the same low bucket. I may as well just call them Indians from now on in my replies.

 

[qwerrty]

qingtips.com

Chinese aerospace engineers have proposed a Neptune probe powered by a high-powered nuclear reactor


4-5 minutes

Restricted by the launching capacity of carrier rockets, energy supply, TTC and communication, only one brief flyby exploration has been carried out by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in the late 1980s. In recent years, NASA has proposed several orbiting exploration missions and actively carried out program design and key technological breakthroughs. The launch is expected around the 2030 window.

With the launch of the Long March-5 carrier rocket and the rapid development of China's space reactor power supply, the exploration of Neptune orbit has achieved preliminary engineering feasibility.

Recently, aerospace engineers wrote in Science in China: Technology science, published research papers, this paper puts forward using nuclear reactor power ratio blunt characteristic of electric propulsion, accompanied by exquisite deep space orbit design, will greatly reduce fuel quantity to carry and detector can satisfy the current our country biggest capacity of the long March 5 rocket carrying capacity constraints, the realizability Neptune orbiting probe with the project.

At present, NASA still uses conventional chemical propellant engines for deceleration, which require very high lift capacity and cost.

According to the fact that Neptune is as far away as 30AU from the earth and the spacecraft has a design life of 15 years, the authors propose to use the gravity of Jupiter and the earth to accelerate the spacecraft for several times, so as to effectively shorten the flight time to the sea. After reaching the planet of Neptune (8700 km), the 10-kilowatt-power nuclear reactor power pile will be used to power the high-power electric propulsion engines, and the deceleration will be carried out for about one year to capture Neptune's gravity field and eventually orbit the planet.

Because the specific impulse of electric propulsion is about one order of magnitude higher than that of traditional chemical propulsion, it can greatly save the amount of fuel to carry, so that the total weight of the probe can be controlled at about 3 tons, meeting the carrying capacity requirements of the Long March 5 rocket.

In terms of communication, if the same communication equipment used in China's Tien Wen 1 Mars exploration mission is adopted, the actual communication capacity will be about one thousandth of that near Mars due to the distance of Neptune is 30AU, which cannot meet the mission requirements. The adoption of Ka frequency band of higher communication frequency, the improvement of satellite antenna aperture, high efficiency coding technology and other means, supplemented by the alternately switched on strategy of scientific detection and data transmission, can effectively ensure the timely transmission of detection data to the earth.

The research results put forward four types of major scientific problems involved in Neptune exploration, introduced the mission function module, flight path, design constraints and other preliminary scheme, focusing on the 10kWe class space reactor power supply scheme, the formation of the probe platform scheme, which can provide a reference for the demonstration and implementation of Neptune exploration in China. The work was supported by the Civil Space Pre-Research Program of the China National Space Administration.