Two graduate assistants and a post-doctoral research associate will work with Dr. Roy to build the computational models. NASA GRC will be the support facility for experimental setup and model validation. Dr. Roy said the thrusters currently in use by NASA are not well-suited for long term missions. Because they travel at such a slow speed, Roy said, spacecraft like the Pioneer spacecraft won t reach another star for something like 34,000 years. The current thrusters are not efficient in the way the plasma interacts with the propellant because of on-set instability and associated voltage drop near the electrodes.
Propellant gas is passed between two electrodes where it becomes ionized.
The ionized particles shoot out at a higher speed than they go in, and this difference in velocity causes a reactional force which propels the spacecraft. Dr. Roy said the goal is to improve the power generated by the thruster to propel the space-craft across our solar system, past the sun s gravitational pull and out of our solar system at a faster speed. Dr. Roy, an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, has also founded a student chapter of the AIAA at Kettering. Other schools that are involved in thruster research include MIT, Princeton University, Stanford University and University of Michigan. We are reaching out from automotive to aerospace to outer space, he added.