New Engine Raises Possibility of Cheap Travel To the Moon

Posted by timothy on Saturday March 31, 2012 @06:09AM from the how-many-altarian-dollars-though dept.

shreshtha writes with this intriguing bit from The Daily Mail: "A tiny satellite thruster which can journey to the Moon on just a tenth of a litre of fuel could usher in a new low-cost space age, its creators hope. The mini-motor weights just a few hundred grams and runs on an ionic chemical compound, using electricity to expel ions and generate thrust. The tiny motor isn't built to blast satellites into orbit — instead, it's to help spacecraft manouevre once they're in space, which previously required bulky, expensive engines."

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Re:Sweet! by tommasorepetti · 2012-03-31 07:07 · Score: 5, Interesting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_1 This is not exactly new... at all. NASA's ion engines have been in service for several years now. Also a tenth liter of fuel is also willfully misleading: the engines expell a liter of propellant but that is not fuel. It is just the expelled material whose momentum generates the forward thrust.