mileage on the engine increases. That wisdom does not hold true for NASA’s ion engine, whose odometer continues to spin to the delight of its owners. This little engine that could has more than made ...

It may contain inaccuracies due to the limitations of machine translation. Ion engines are the workhorse of deep space, but a new thruster that seemingly violates physics is gaining attention. The ...

Sending an object to another star is still the stuff of science fiction. But some concrete missions could get us at least part way there. These "interstellar precursor missions" include a trip to the ...

CLEVELAND — A small robotic surveyor arrives to explore a near-Earth asteroid. Another robotic spacecraft is returning to Earth with a pristine comet surface sample. Meanwhile, a robotic explorer is ...

Space debris is a growing threat to satellites and missions, with over 14,000 pieces already cluttering low-Earth orbit. To address this, Kazunori Takahashi, a researcher at Tohoku University in Japan ...

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As new materials and manufacturing techniques are discovered, their benefits transform every branch of science and engineering. In spacecraft propulsion, a new generation of ion engines could provide ...

Click to open image viewer. This is a cesium ion engine developed by the Electro-Optical Systems, Inc. as an experimental high-energy thruster for spacecraft. Ion engines produce extremely low thrusts ...

There’s little about building spacecraft that anyone would call simple. But there’s at least one element of designing a vehicle that will operate outside the Earth’s atmosphere that’s fairly easier to ...