Seriously, for all you coffee addicts, this is science. You may recall how astronaut Don Pettit (known as Mr. Fixit in space) invented a Zero-G coffee cup. But there’s an experiment on board the International Space Station called the Capillary Flow Experiment that is delving even further into how liquids behave in space.
Coffee is not the only liquid that behaves quite differently in space as opposed to on Earth. There are things like cryogenic fuels, thermal coolants, water and urine, too. As NASA says, “The behavior of fluids is one of the most un-intuitive things in all of space flight.”
This poses a challenge for engineers designing spacecraft systems that use fluids. “Our intuition is all wrong,” said physics professor Mark Weislogel of Portland State University, who working with the Capillary Flow Experiment. “When it comes to guessing what fluids will do in new systems, we are often in the dark.”
Weislogel and his colleagues are now looking at interior corners on containers and how that affects liquid flow. Just like on Pettit’s Zero-G coffe cup (see video below), if two solid surfaces meet at a narrow-enough angle, fluids in microgravity naturally flow along the joint —no pumping required.
NASA says this capillary effect could be used to guide all kinds of fluids through spacecraft, from cryogenic fuel to recycled waste water. The phenomenon is difficult to study on Earth, where it is damped by gravity, but on the space station large scale corner flows are easy to create and observe.
Who says coffee isn’t like your morning rocket fuel!
Have you ever noticed that the Moon always looks the same? Sure, the phase changes, but the actual features on the Moon always look the same from month to month.
Does the Moon rotate? What’s going on?
From our perspective here on Earth, the Moon always shows us the same face because it’s tidally locked to our planet. At some point in the distant past, the Moon did rotate from our perspective, but the Earth’s gravity kept pulling unevenly at the Moon, slowing its rotation. Eventually the Moon locked into place, always displaying the same side to us.
But if you looked down on the Earth-Moon system from the north celestial pole, from the perspective of Polaris, the North Star, you’d see that the Moon actually does rotate on its axis. In fact, as the Moon travels around the Earth in a counter-clockwise orbit every 27.5 days, it also completes one full rotation on its axis – also moving in a counter-clockwise direction.
If you look at a time lapse animation of the Moon moving entirely through its phases over the course of a month, you’ll notice a strange wobble, as if the Moon is rocking back and forth on its axis a bit.
This is known as libration.
On average, the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth’s surface. But its actual orbit is elliptical, it moves closer and then more distant from the Earth.
When the Moon is at its closest point, it’s rotation is slower than its orbital speed, so we see an additional 8 degrees on its eastern side. And then when the Moon is at the most distant point, the rotation is faster than its orbital speed, so we can see 8 degrees on the Western side.
Libration allowed astronomers to map out more of the Moon’s surface than we could if the Moon followed a circular orbit.
Until the space age, half the Moon was hidden from us, always facing away. This hemisphere of the Moon was finally first observed by the Soviet Luna 3 probe in 1959, followed by the first human eyes with Apollo 8 in 1968.
The two hemispheres of the Moon are very different.
While the near side is covered with large basaltic plains called maria, the far side is almost completely covered in craters. The reasons for this difference is still a mystery to planetary scientists, but it’s possible that a second Moon crashed into it, billions of years ago, creating the strange surface we see today.
So yes, the Moon does rotate.
But its rotation exactly matches its orbit around the Earth, which is why it looks like it never does.
The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Persopolis, Iran (image credit: Oshin D. Zakarian/TWAN).
Citizen scientists have discovered planets beyond our Solar System and established morphological classifications for thousands of galaxies (e.g., the Planet Hunters and Galaxy Zoo projects). At an upcoming meeting of planetary scientists, Hamed Pourkhorsandi from the University of Tehran will present his efforts to mobilize citizens to identify impact craters throughout Persia. Pourkhorsandi said he is recruiting volunteers to identify craters using Google Earth, while continuing to seek sightings of fireballs cited in ancient books and among rural folk. Discovering impact craters is an important endeavour, since it helps astronomers estimate how many asteroids of a particular size strike Earth over a given time (i.e., the impact frequency). Indeed, that is especially relevant in light of the recent meteor explosion over Russia this past February (see the UT article here), which hints at the potentially destructive nature of such occurrences.
Satellite images have facilitated the detection of impact sites such as the Kamil and Puka craters, which were identified by V. de Michele and D. Hamacher using Google Earth, respectively (see the UT article here). Pourkhorsandi noted that, “Free access to satellite images has led to the investigation of earth’s surface by specialists and nonspecialists, attempts that have led to the discovery of new impact craters around the globe. [Yet] few researches on this topic have been done in the Middle East.” Incidentally, citizens are likewise being recruited to classify craters and features on other bodies in the Solar System (e.g., the Moon Zoo project).
The Kamil impact crater in Egypt was discovered by V. de Michele using Google Earth, and H. Pourkhorsandi is recruiting volunteers to discover such structures throughout Persia following a similar approach (image credit: L. Folco).
In his paper, Pourkhorsandi describes examples of two targets investigated thus far: “1. a circular structure with a diameter of 200 m (33°21’57”N 58°14’24”E). [However,] there is no sign of … meteoritic fragments in the region that are primary diagnostic indicators for small size impact craters.” The second target is tied to an old tale, and note that the Puka crater in Australia was identified by following-up on an old Aboriginal story. However, Pourkhorsandi states that a field study of the second target (28°24’52” N 60°34’44” E) revealed that the crater is not associated with an impactor from space.
“Beside these structures, field studies on other craters in Persia are in progress, the outcomes of which will be announced in the near future,” said Pourkhorsandi.
Pourkhorsandi underscores that numerous meteorites have been found in desert regions throughout the world, yet scant attention has been given to Persian deserts (e.g., the Lut desert). The Lut desert in Persia extends over several thousand square kilometres and is one of the hottest places on Earth (featuring land surface temperatures upwards of 70 degrees Celsius). Pourkhorsandi noted that in 2005 a ‘curious stone’ was recovered in the Lut desert and subsequent work revealed its extraterrestrial origin.
He went on to remark that, “Three recent short field trips to the central Lut desert led to the collection of several meteoritic fragments, which points to large concentrations of meteoritic materials in the area.” Some of those fragments are shown in the figure below, and the broader region is likely a pertinent place for citizen scientists to continue the hunt for impact craters in Persia.
Pourkhorsandi concluded by telling the Universe Today, “In the future we aim to expand our efforts with the help of additional people, and will direct individuals to scan other regions of the planet. Simultaneously, we have commenced a comprehensive analysis of meteorites in the Lut desert with fellow European scientists.”
H chondrite fragments found in the Lut desert (in Persia) are argued to be extraterrestrial in origin (image credit: Fig. 3 in Pourkhorsandi 2013/LPI).
Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen during 2010 geology training near Gila Bend, Arizona. Credit: Canadian Space Agency
This week, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen is on his way to a remote island in the Canadian Arctic. We realize this sounds like the opening episode for Survivor, but his purpose up there is more scientific: to conduct field geology.
Geology work, and training for sample collection is not as easy as simply picking up whatever you see on the ground. It’s important to get a range of rocks that represent the geology of the area. You also need to photograph and otherwise document the area in such a way that geologists can learn more about how it was formed, among other duties.
A trained observer can come to preliminary conclusions while wandering around in the field, and possibly change his or her sample-gathering strategy in accordance with that. The Apollo moon missions were replete with examples of this, with one of the more famous ones perhaps being when Harrison Schmitt (who, unlike his colleagues, had a Ph.D. in geology) stumbled across some orange soil during Apollo 17. This was probably evidence of an ancient fire-fountain of lava on the moon.
But Schmitt certainly wasn’t expecting to see that when he walked on the surface. Check out his reaction around 1:50 in this video:
Hansen will join a Western University group to study “impact cratering processes while learning methods and techniques for conducting geological fieldwork that can be applied to sites beyond our planet,” stated the Canadian Space Agency. To make it feel more space mission-like, the group will be working with limited supplies and support.
Geology training isn’t important just on the ground, but also in observing from space. As Hansen points out on this video, from time to time astronauts on the International Space Station are called upon to observe features from their orbital perches. If they understand the processes behind what they see, their descriptions, videos and photos will be more scientific.
Hansen will stay on Devon Island until about July 25, studying impact crater processes along with the rest of the team. Updates should be available on his Twitter feed as well as through the Canadian Space Agency.
And by the way, Canada was also useful to astronauts during the Apollo years. One famous geology site was at Sudbury, Ont. This website highlights the activities of the Apollo 16 crew, which was looking at craters in the area.
Screenshot from the video showing where Hebes Chasma is located on Mars. Via ESA.
Take a ride through a Hebes Chasma, a canyon just north of the largest canyon on Mars – and the Solar System — Valles Marineris. The video provides an awesome view, but this is not a wild ride with Luke Skywalker through trenches of the Death Star …. it’s more like a tourist pleasure cruise which provides picturesque views of this 8 km-deep canyon.
ESA provides all the tourist info of what you are seeing:
The movie glides over impact craters pockmarking the plains separating the troughs, down cliff faces scarred by landslides, and along the rough valley floor.
In some parts of the valley Mars Express has detected water-bearing minerals, suggesting that significant quantities of water may have once flowed here.
The formation of Hebes Chasma is likely connected to the nearby volcanic Tharsis region, home to the planet’s vast Olympus Mons volcano.
During periods of intense volcanism the whole region stretched upwards, causing tremendous stress in the crust further way. Unable to withstand the strain, the crust ripped open, collapsing into the chasms found in and around Valles Marineris.
We’re going to try a new experiment with the Virtual Star Party this week. I’m going to post the video live on Universe Today as we start it up. Join us live here, or watch the archive after.
This week we had two active telescopes, from Cory Schmitz and Gary Gonnella. We did a quick tour through the nebula region of the Milky Way, making stops at the Ring Nebula, Dumbbell Nebula, Veil Nebula, Lagoon Nebula, Triffid Nebula, a couple of star clusters and even a galaxy.
If you want to join the Virtual Star Party live, we broadcast every Sunday night when it gets dark on the West Coast of North America. For July 21st, it’ll probably be 9:00 pm PDT/12:00 am EDT. But we’re much earlier in the Winter.
P.S. We’re always looking for new astronomers to join us. If you’ve got a telescope that can broadcast images to your computer, and you’d like to participate, please drop me an email at [email protected], and I’ll help you get set up.
Gennady Borisov, who lives in Naunchniy near the Crimean Observatory in the Ukraine, discovered the comet C/2013 N4 on July 8. He's shown here with his two telescopes. Credit: Oleg Bruzgalov
Ukrainian amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov discovered a brand new comet on July 8 near the bright star Capella in the constellation Auriga. The comet was confirmed and officially christened C/2013 N4 (Borisov) on July 13. At the time of discovery, Borisov was attending the Russian-Ukrainian “Southern Night” star party in Crimea, Ukraine. He nabbed the comet – his first – using an 8-inch (20-cm) f/1.5 wide field telescope of his own design equipped with a CCD camera.
Comet Borisov is the fuzzy spot with a brighter central region in this recent photo. Credit: Oleg Bruzgalov
The new comet is on the faint side, appearing as a small, fuzzy patch of 13th magnitude with a brighter center. To see it you’ll need at least a 10-inch (25-cm) telescope and the fortitude to rise in the wee hours before dawn. The reason for the early hour is Borisov’s location in Auriga, a constellation that doesn’t clear the horizon until shortly before the start of morning twilight. Faintness and low altitude will combine to make Comet Borisov an enticing if challenging object for amateur astronomers.
Animation of Comet Borisov compiled from multiple images. Credit: http://astronomamator.narod.ru/cometes/comet_anim.gif
C/2013 N4 is currently traveling through Auriga not far from the easy-to-spot naked eye star Beta and will slowly brighten as it approaches perihelion – closest point to the sun – on August 20 at a distance of 113.5 million miles (182.7 million km). Unfortunately its elongation or separation from the sun will be slowly shrinking in the coming weeks, causing the comet to drop lower in the sky as it approaches perihelion. Our fuzzy visitor misses Earth by a comfortable 192.5 million miles (310 million km) on August 11. It’s likely Comet Borisov won’t get much brighter than 12th magnitude. Astronomers are still working out the details of its orbit, so it’s possible brightness predictions could change in the near future.
C/2013 N4 (Borisov) tracks through northern Auriga not far from Capella in the coming nights. Positions are shown every 5 days at 3 a.m. CDT. The comet is faint and will require a more detailed chart and telescope to see. Created with Stellarium
Aside from how prominent or not Gennady’s comet will become, the most amazing thing is that he beat the automated surveys to the punch. These days nearly all comets and many asteroids are found by professional astronomers using robotic telescopes hooked up to sensitive cameras and computers. Large areas of the sky are covered each clear night. If a fuzzy, moving object is detected by the computer, astronomers are alerted, follow-up observations are made and the new object receives a letter, number and the survey’s name. That’s why there are a plethora of comets in the past 15 years with names like LINEAR(Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Survey), Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System), LONEOS (Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search) and others.
By dint of persistence, a smart plan and a keen eye, Gennady Borisov has made his mark in the sky. For that he deserves a well-deserved congratulations and round of applause!
Amateurs who wish to plot the comet on a star map using a star charting software program can get Comet Borisov’s orbital elements HERE. To follow the latest developments, check out Leonid Elenin’s blog. You might recall it was Elenin in 2010 who discovered famed comet C/2010 X1 (Elenin), blamed for everything from earthquakes to future world catastrophes. Instead, the comet proved so friable, it disintegrated as it approached the sun. Let’s see how Comet Borisov fares.
The LADEE spacecraft awaits spin balance testing, conducted to ensure stability during flight, at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. LADEE is slated to liftoff from Wallops on Sep. 5, 2013 July 10. Credit: NASA/Patrick Black
NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) Observatory has arrived at the launch site on the Eastern Shore of Virginia at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island and is now in the midst of weeks of performance testing to ensure it is ready for liftoff in early September.
The LADEE lunar orbiting probe will be the first planetary science mission ever launched from NASAWallops and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS). It will soar to space atop a solid fueled Minotaur V rocket on its maiden flight.
LADEE will blaze a brilliant trail to the Moon during a spectacular nighttime blastoff slated for Sept. 6, 2013 at 11:27 PM from Launch Pad 0B.
LADEE is equipped with three science instruments to gather detailed information about the lunar atmosphere, conditions near the surface and environmental influences on lunar dust.
“LADEE will investigate the moons tenuous exosphere, trace outgases like the sodium halo and lofted dust at the terminator,” said Jim Green, Planetary Science Division Director at NASA HQ, in an exclusive interview with Universe Today.
“The spacecraft has a mass spectrometer to identify the gases, a physical dust detector and an imager to look at scattered light from the dust. These processes also occur at asteroids.”
“And it will also test a laser communications system that is a technology demonstrator for future planetary science missions. It communicates at 650 megabits per second,” Green explained to me.
The couch sized 844 pound (383 kg) robotic explorer was assembled at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field Calif., and is a cooperative project with NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland.
The LADEE spacecraft awaits spin balance testing, conducted to ensure stability during flight, at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. LADEE is slated to liftoff from Wallops on Sept. 6, 2013. Credit: NASA/Patrick Black
The spacecraft was then shipped cross country by a dedicated truck inside a specially-designed shipping container – blanketed with protective nitrogen – which insulated the spacecraft from temperature, moisture, bumps in the road and more than a few crazy drivers.
The first leg of LADEE’s trip to the Moon took 5 days. The trans lunar leg will take 30 days.
It’s standard practice that whenever space probes are moved by ground transportation that they are accompanied by a caravan that includes a lead scout vehicle to ensure safe road conditions and followed by engineers monitoring the health and environmental storage conditions.
Technicians are now engaged in a lengthy series of performance tests to confirm that LADEE was not damaged during the road trip and that all spacecraft systems are functioning properly.
“One important preparation about to begin is spin-balancing LADEE,” says Butler Hine, LADEE Project Manager. “During this procedure, the spacecraft is mounted to a spin table and rotated at a high-speed to make sure it is perfectly balanced for launch.”
After all spacecraft systems pass the performance tests, LADEE will be fueled, encapsulated and moved to the Wallops Island launch pad later this summer for mating with the five stage Minotaur V booster stack.
“I’m excited about the night launch because people up and down the Atlantic seacoast will be able to see it,” Green told me.
Looking up the Flame Trench –
LADEE Launch Pad 0B at NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.comAerial view of NASA Wallops launch site on Virginia shore shows launch pads for both suborbital and orbital rockets. The Antares rocket Pad 0A for missions to the ISS is in the foreground. Suborbital rockets blast off just behind the Pad 0A water tower. This photo was snapped from on top of Pad 0B that will soon launch NASA‘s LADEE orbiter to the Moon. Credit: Ken Kremer- kenkremer.com
Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser successfully rolls through two tow tests at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California in preparation for future flight testing
Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Dream Chaser successfully rolls through two tow tests at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in California in preparation for future flight testing later this year. Watch way cool Dream Chaser assembly video below![/caption]
Sierra Nevada Corporation’s winged Dream Chaser engineering test article is moving forward with a series of ground tests at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in California that will soon lead to dramatic aerial flight tests throughout 2013.
Pathfinding tow tests on Dryden’s concrete runway aim to validate the performance of the vehicles’ nose skid, brakes, tires and other systems to prove that it can safely land an astronaut crew after surviving the searing re-entry from Earth orbit.
The Dream Chaser is one of the three types of private sector ‘space taxis’ being developed with NASA seed money to restore America’s capability to blast humans to Earth orbit from American soil – a capability which was totally lost following the forced shutdown of NASA’s Space Shuttle program in 2011.
Dream Chaser commercial crew vehicle built by Sierra Nevada Corp docks at ISS
For the initial ground tests, the engineering test article was pulled by a tow truck at 10 and 20 MPH. Later this month tow speeds will be ramped up to 40 to 60 MPH.
Final assembly of the Dream Chaser test vehicle was completed at Dryden with installation of the wings and tail, following shipment from SNC’s Space Systems headquarters in Louisville, Colo.
Watch this exciting minute-long, time-lapse video showing attachment of the wings and tail:
In the next phase later this year, Sierra Nevada will conduct airborne captive carry tests using an Erickson Skycrane helicopter.
Atmospheric drop tests of the engineering test article in an autonomous free flight mode for Approach and Landing Tests (ALT) will follow to check the aerodynamic handling.
The engineering test article is a full sized vehicle.
Dream Chaser is a reusable mini shuttle that launches from the Florida Space Coast atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket and lands on the shuttle landing facility (SLF) runway at the Kennedy Space Center, like the Space Shuttle.
“It’s not outfitted for orbital flight. It is outfitted for atmospheric flight tests,” said Marc Sirangelo, Sierra Nevada Corp. vice president and SNC Space Systems chairman, to Universe Today.
“The best analogy is it’s very similar to what NASA did in the shuttle program with the Enterprise, creating a vehicle that would allow it to do significant flights whose design then would filter into the final vehicle for orbital flight,” Sirangelo told me.
NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center welcomes SNC’s Dream Chaser shrink wrapped engineering test article for a flight test program in collaboration with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program this summer. Winds and tail were soon joined and ground testing has now begun. Credit: NASA/Tom Tschida
Sierra Nevada Corp, along with Boeing and SpaceX are working with NASA in a public-private partnership using a combination of NASA seed money and company funds.
Each company was awarded contracts under NASA’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capability Initiative, or CCiCap, program, the third in a series of contracts aimed at kick starting the development of the private sector ‘space taxis’ to fly US and partner astronauts to and from low Earth orbit (LEO) and the International Space Station (ISS).
“We are the emotional successors to the shuttle,” says Sirangelo. “Our target was to repatriate that industry back to the United States, and that’s what we’re doing.”
The combined value of NASA’s Phase 1 CCiCap contracts is about $1.1 Billion and runs through March 2014.
Phase 2 contract awards will eventually lead to actual flight units after a down selection to one or more of the companies.
Everything depends on NASA’s approved budget, which seems headed for steep cuts in excess of a billion dollars if the Republican dominated US House has its way.
Dream Chaser awaits launch atop Atlas V rocket
The Commercial Crew program’s goal is to ensure the nation has safe, reliable and affordable crew transportation systems to space.
“Unique public-private partnerships like the one between NASA and Sierra Nevada Corporation are creating an industry capable of building the next generation of rockets and spacecraft that will carry U.S. astronauts to the scientific proving ground of low-Earth orbit,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations in Washington, in a statement.
“NASA centers around the country paved the way for 50 years of American human spaceflight, and they’re actively working with our partners to test innovative commercial space systems that will continue to ensure American leadership in exploration and discovery.”
All three commercial vehicles – the Boeing CST-100; SpaceX Dragon and Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser – are designed to carry a crew of up to 7 astronauts and remain docked at the ISS for more than 6 months.
The first orbital flight test of the Dream Chaser is not expected before 2016 and could be further delayed if NASA’s commercial crew budget is again slashed by the Congress – as was done the past few years.
In the meantime, US astronauts are totally dependent on Russia’s Soyuz capsule for rides to the ISS. NASA must pay Russia upwards of $70 million per seat until the space taxis are ready for liftoff – perhaps in 2017.
“We have got to get Commercial Crew funded, or we’re going to be paying the Russians forever,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden at Dryden. “Without Commercial Crew, we probably won’t have exploration.”
Concurrently, NASA is developing the Orion Crew capsule for missions to the Moon, Asteroids and beyond to Mars and other destinations in our Solar System -details here.
Scale models of NASA’s Commercial Crew program vehicles and launchers; Boeing CST-100, Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser, SpaceX Dragon.
Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.comSierra Nevada Corp.’s Dream Chaser spacecraft landing on a traditional runway. Dream Chaser is being developed in collaboration with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program during the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability initiative (CCiCAP). Credit: Sierra Nevada Corp.
Artist concept of a 5 kg CubeSat with CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster (CAT) firing in low Earth orbit. Via Kickstarter.
Cubesats are all the rage these days: they’re usually inexpensive and quick to build and they can tag along on launches already scheduled for other things. We think of cubesats as being almost “disposable” satellites – tiny spacecraft that go into Earth orbit for a short time, do their science and then burn up harmlessly in Earth’s atmosphere. But a team of scientists have a more long-term, long-distance plan for their cubesats. Benjamin Longmier and James Cutler from the University of Michigan want to build cubesats that have tiny plasma thruster engines that could propel them into deep space, maybe even interstellar space.
They have a vision of their plasma-thruster cubesat waving as it speeds past the Voyager spacecraft at the edge of our Solar System.
They are working on what they call the CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster (CAT), a new plasma propulsion system. This thruster technology doesn’t exist all in one piece yet, but Longmeir and Cutler said they could put it together in months, with just a little funding. The CAT plasma thruster will propel a 5kg satellite into deep space, far beyond Earth orbit, at 1/1000th the cost of previous missions.
They’ve begun a $200,000 Kickstarter campaign to help fund their project. Their ideas of what these thruster propelled cubesats could do are mind-bogglingly exciting: flying through the plumes of Enceladus to look for life, studying and tagging asteroids, formation flying through Earth’s magnetosphere to learn more about solar flares and the aurora or just an interplanetary message in a bottle lasting for hundreds of millions of years in orbit around the Sun.
They think they can get a satellite up and flying within 18 months.
“The traditional funding process starts with some seed data, a large government grant and a large number of milestones and gates to go through,” said Longmier in a press release from the University of Michigan. “We’d like to leverage Kickstarter funds to compress that timeline and go from initial seed data to flight in about 18 months, a much faster time scale than is possible with traditional grants.”
The cubesats would be about as big as a loaf of bread and the thrusters – the first of its kind — would use superheated plasma directed through a magnetic field to propel the CubeSat. The duo says that with this technology, exploring interplanetary space and eventually other planets would become faster and cheaper than ever before.
While plasma rockets have been used before, they’ve only been used on big spacecraft like Deep Space 1 and DAWN. Longmier and Cutler are miniaturizing the system. Most of the thruster components have been built and have been tested individually, but they need help through Kickstarter to assemble everything into one compact thruster unit for testing the integrated components in the lab, then in Earth orbit, and then interplanetary space.
They’ve got more info on how the thrusters work on their Kickstarter page.
