NASA's NEXT Ion Thruster Runs Five and a Half Years Nonstop To Set New Record

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NASA's NEXT Ion Thruster Runs Five and a Half Years Nonstop To Set New Record

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 27, 2013 @01:02AM from the slow-and-steady-and-breathe-and-good dept.

cylonlover writes "Last December, NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) passed 43,000 hours of operation. But the advanced ion propulsion engine wasn't finished. On Monday, NASA announced that it has now operated for 48,000 hours, or five and a half years, setting a record for the longest test duration of any type of space propulsion system that will be hard to beat."

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Perfect analogy for NASA by Gothmolly · 2013-06-27 01:06 · Score: 5, Funny

Running your engines at full power but standing in one spot for 5 years. That pretty much sums up our space program since Apollo.

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1. Re:Perfect analogy for NASA by h4rr4r · 2013-06-27 01:27 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  So then those rovers on Mars are figments of my imagination?
  Our space program since Apollo has gotten better. Unless you think their is some scientific value in sending humans to play golf on other worlds.
2. Re:Perfect analogy for NASA by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2013-06-27 01:28 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Would it be insufferably pedantic to mention Pioneer 10/11, Explorer 49, Mariner 10, Helios A/B(with Germany), Viking 1 and 2, Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer Venus 1 and 2, ISEE-3(with EU), Magellan, Galileo, Hubble(with EU), Ulysses(with EU), Mars Observer, Clementine, WIND, NEAR Shoemaker, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Pathfinder, ACE, Cassini-Huygens(with EU), Lunar Prospector, DS1, Stardust, Mars Odyssey, Genesis, Mars Exploration Rovers, MESSENGER, Deep Impact, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, New Horizons(in transit), STEREO, Pheonix, Dawn, Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter, Solar Dynamics Observatory, Juno, GRAIL, Mars Science Laboratory, and Radiation Belt Storm Probes?
  Sure, our man-in-a-can cred isn't what it used to be; but I, for one, welcome our robotic overlords.
3. Re:Perfect analogy for NASA by Penguinisto · 2013-06-27 02:00 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Our space program since Apollo has gotten better. Unless you think their is some scientific value in sending humans to play golf on other worlds.
  Laugh and minimize all you want, but the one geologist to land on the Moon managed to learn more (and faster) in his one short trip than all of the Mars rovers combined. Why, you ask? Because he didn't have to waste time looking at a picture and speculating on what a shadow or shape looked like it could be. Instead, he just walked up to an item of interest, looked at it, and was able to discern in seconds something that, well, takes teams of scientists weeks on end to speculate over nowadays.
  ...then there's that niggling fact that someday, space may be the only habitable home we have left after this one gets wrecked - be it by us or by the first asteroid that decides not to simply pass by. It would be nice to already have the tech to live there - preferably long before we're forced to learn it on a tight schedule.
  
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4. Re:Perfect analogy for NASA by Penguinisto · 2013-06-27 02:02 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  It also sums up the fact that space is an enormous deadly vacuum with no real reason to send people there.
  Hate to say it, but we already live in space - this big ball of mud and air that we call home happens to float in it. It'd be nice to get out in the neighborhood a little, no?
  
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  Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
5. Re:Perfect analogy for NASA by h4rr4r · 2013-06-27 02:03 · Score: 2
  
  I am not laughing nor minimizing. Scientists are not stuck with pictures, but tools not even available during the Apollo era are on those rovers to sample rocks.
  I agree, but we simply will not bother until we are forced. We can't even get people to update coal power plants, you can forget them wanting to spend a dime on this.
6. Re:Perfect analogy for NASA by Rhipf · 2013-06-27 02:27 · Score: 2
  
  Actually the geologist learned more than the Mars rovers combined since the rovers didn't land on the moon. Its hard to learn more about the moon than a live person when you are millions of miles away.
7. Re:Perfect analogy for NASA by Dyolf+Knip · 2013-06-27 02:48 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Not really. The tools are impressive, but mostly in how they try to overcome the crippling need to run remotely from umpteen million miles away.
  Let's have a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_(rover)#Instruments
  Lists 14 instruments. But 5 of them are just cameras, strategically placed because they can't be moved. My friend the amateur photographer could do much better with her DSLR. The "environmental monitoring station" measures humidity, pressure, temperatures, wind speeds, and ultraviolet radiation; not exactly groundbreaking stuff here. Same with radiation assessment. There's a robotic arm capable of drilling holes a whopping 2" deep and a dust removal tool, commonly known as a 'broom'. The "Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons" sounds sexy as hell, but then you realize a person with a trowel could do the same job.
  The other instruments are all spectrometers and a chromatograph. The means by which they work are novel, due to the aforementioned remote requirements, but the end result is not really different from what could be done in any decent lab 50 years ago. Honestly, a decent scientist with a shovel and a few thousand dollars in high school lab gear could do better than all the rovers ever sent. God help us if we ever needed a probe to do something _really_ difficult.
  So by all means, send what probes are needed to figure out how to get people there, but anything beyond that will just provide minimal information at enormous cost.
  
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  Dyolf Knip
8. Re:Perfect analogy for NASA by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-27 02:59 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  ...then there's that niggling fact that someday, space may be the only habitable home we have left after this one gets wrecked
  
  Don't take offense, because I'm sure you're thinking this because you've been told so many times that this would be the case, but why is there the common belief that mankind would find a complete vacuum, devoid of ANY resources other than photons, be more suitable for our life than the Earth would be in any state of pollutive decay?
  If we can build capsules for space, why not do the same thing here and protect ourselves from the elements? We can use space suits to travel around the exterior here, too, extracting useful resources from the fetid scum we created, and if we can shield ourselves from cosmic radiation, why wouldn't we be able to shield ourselves from any possible post-nuclear-holocaust radiation?
  I'm certainly not suggesting that NASA is a waste of money - I am an aerospace engineer, after all - I'm just saying that if your house became infested with termites, you wouldn't resign yourself to abandoning it and living on a houseboat in the middle of the ocean because there are no termites in the middle of the ocean.
9. Re:Perfect analogy for NASA by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-27 03:47 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  My friend the amateur photographer could do much better with her DSLR.
  Can your friend do better while fitting in a small box without life support? If we took the budget, both in terms of costs, volume, and amount of equipment needed to send a person there, that could buy a lot of cameras, and ones that could move around just as much as your friend could move them around.
  
  The "Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons" sounds sexy as hell, but then you realize a person with a trowel could do the same job.
  Not quite the same as a person with a trowel, considering neutron sources get used for analysis by geologists on Earth even where there are plenty of trowels. Even if you had a person on Mars, with a trowel or not, it would be quicker for them to drag a sled behind them with a similar instrument than to dig up the ground everywhere.
  
  The other instruments are all spectrometers and a chromatograph. The means by which they work are novel, due to the aforementioned remote requirements, but the end result is not really different from what could be done in any decent lab 50 years ago. Honestly, a decent scientist with a shovel and a few thousand dollars in high school lab gear could do better than all the rovers ever sent.
  
  50 years ago, such equipment was quite bulky and not very rugged. While you could do such work with a 50 year old lab, you wouldn't want to send a such a whole lab to Mars. Especially in the last decade or two, such equipment has become much more portable allowing for their use in the field, on Earth or not. There is plenty of equipment that went from, "I'll have to take these samples back to look at them," to "we could set up a large tent or shed to do local work," to, "I have one in the back of my truck."
  
  So by all means, send what probes are needed to figure out how to get people there, but anything beyond that will just provide minimal information at enormous cost.
  Because sending a person will provide slightly more than minimal information at an even more enormous cost? If you had the budget you would spend on such a mission spent on probes, you would quickly make up for a large part of the lack in versatility, and for most work surpass what the person can do in terms of speed by having many probes work in parallel.
10. Re:Perfect analogy for NASA by Intrepid+imaginaut · 2013-06-27 04:16 · Score: 2
  
  devoid of ANY resources other than photons, be more suitable for our life than the Earth would be in any state of pollutive decay?
  Those photons are quite a resource in their own right. But there is also every element you can find on earth floating around in ridiculous abundance, and easier to access too.
  As to why, well there aren't many reasons to choose a station over earth, but there are plenty of reasons to choose a station over anywhere else. We would have perfect control over the gravity in a station for a start, which neatly sidesteps a whole host of problems with either bone decalcification or excessive gravity, not to mention being able to fine tune the environment any way we like. The idea might seem a little claustrophobic at first glance but really, it would be like living in a large city with vacations elsewhere from time to time.
  I predict we'll colonise space itself long before we start colonising other worlds.
11. Re:Perfect analogy for NASA by Sperbels · 2013-06-27 06:05 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  He wasn't talking about Mars, but the moon. His argument stands.
  No, he was walking about Mars. Quote: Not totally fair to say he couldn't find water, but Opportunity found it, while the geologist couldn't. Opportunity is a Mars rover. The geologist in question is Harrison Schmitt who went to the moon. He wasn't even looking for water...not that they put him in a place likely to have it. He was simply there to use his expert geologist eyes to find something geologically interesting, otherwise they would have just had one of their pilot astronauts grab some rocks. These aren't even comparable things. But I'm sure if you placed a geologist in the same spot Opportunity was, he could have found evidence for water in 30 minutes or less and spotted several other interesting things as well. Robots aren't adaptable to other kinds of missions. They do what they're designed for. A human can accomplish a multitude of things, adapt, and apply new knowledge on the spot. Yeah, robots cost a fraction of what it would take to put a human up there, a human can also accomplish far far more. But to argue that humans can't do more than a robot like the GP implied, is totally absurd.
12. Re:Perfect analogy for NASA by Intrepid+imaginaut · 2013-06-27 06:28 · Score: 2
  
  The point of course is that without massive investment in infrastructure, pipelines, manufacturing capability, and technological advancement which continues to this day, cars would make much less sense than horses, particularly economically. Cars and oil didn't become cheaper by accident/act of god, they are the product of decades, even centuries, of effort.
  Obviously it isn't difficult to extrapolate this as regards asteroid mining.
13. Re:Perfect analogy for NASA by a-zarkon! · 2013-06-27 07:19 · Score: 2
  
  Interesting argument. What does it cost to feed and maintain a horse? What is the maximum speed and range of a horse? Can a horse power air travel? The energy cost efficiency of internal combustion is pretty hard to beat with today's technology.
  That undersea oil was there 100 years ago, but there was more readily available oil that was easier and cheaper to get to so we didn't have a motivation to go after the harder stuff. Technology also improved to enable us to go after the harder to retrieve resources.
  We've been approaching peak oil for twenty years now. What is the forecast for hitting peak iron or peak nickel? Maybe that will be motivation to drive us after the asteroid resources or maybe it will be motivation to more aggressively recycle our local resources. If you look at the pyramids in Egypt and the coliseum in Rome - a lot of the stone work was recycled into building materials for nearby construction. Yes, they had stone quarries they could have gone to get material for the new construction, but it was cheaper and easier to re-use the easily scavenged stones from the previous generation's efforts. Similarly as we hit the back side of peak oil maybe it will push us back to horses - or maybe (hopefully) drive investment into wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear.
Specific impulse by abies · 2013-06-27 01:09 · Score: 5, Funny

I wonder if they had felt a specific impulse to switch it off?
1. Re:Specific impulse by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · 2013-06-27 03:29 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Nah. The lead scientist felt it was ok to let it run as long as they kept a close ion it.
  
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Re:Too bad it's at NASA by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2013-06-27 01:15 · Score: 3, Informative

Which all but guarantees that this engine will never do anything more.
Sort of like the ion thruster on the Dawn probe, which left Vesta about a year ago with an ETA on Ceres sometime in 2015?
Could we achieve 1G of thust. by jellomizer · 2013-06-27 01:21 · Score: 4, Interesting

My Hope if we could build a space craft that can accelerate 9.8m/s^2 (1g) for the duration of going to Mars and Back. You go to at 1g half way to mars, then you decelerate at 1g the other half. Orbit for a period of time. Drop down a landing party for a while. And go back at 1g half way decelerate at 1g the other half. Then you would have a good long range mission with out the 0g effect messing up the body.

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1. Re: Could we achieve 1G of thust. by jellomizer · 2013-06-27 01:42 · Score: 2
  
  Still you need to fight momentum. If you have a ship big enough to hold heavy people with heavier supplies that is a lot of momentum to fight all the time. Sure we can burst speed of multiple G's but once the fuel runs out and the ship goes at a constant speed we are down to 0g.
  
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2. Re:Could we achieve 1G of thust. by Overzeetop · 2013-06-27 02:17 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Without relativistic effects about a year but, as noted by the sibling poster, relativity gets in the way from the outside observers point of view. And what good is next day delivery if the goods are 1 day old and the recipient's great, great, great, great, great granddaughter has to sign for the package?
  Though practically impossible with current or proposed technology, it would, indeed, take only 35 days to reach 0.1c, and we'd be 225 million km from our starting point, ignoring gravitational effects of other bodies. Though in astronomical terms that's not very far (less than the diameter of Earth's orbit) - less than half way to Jupiter on the closest possible approach.
  
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3. Re:Could we achieve 1G of thust. by MrChips · 2013-06-27 02:23 · Score: 2
  
  At 1g accel/decel you could get to Mars in about 24 hours. At 1/3g it would be about 48 hours. And for those who want to approach the speed of light, that would take a year at 1g.
4. Re:Could we achieve 1G of thust. by MBGMorden · 2013-06-27 02:49 · Score: 2
  
  Without relativistic effects about a year but, as noted by the sibling poster, relativity gets in the way from the outside observers point of view. And what good is next day delivery if the goods are 1 day old and the recipient's great, great, great, great, great granddaughter has to sign for the package?
  As a method of delivery its worthless, but as a method of colonization its pretty neat. If by some stretch of the imagination we could identify a planet as definitely habitable from here we send off a crew at some significant fraction of the speed of light. I'm sure the people actually travelling there care a lot more about the passage of time than those of us back on Earth (they'd have to be specially selected with the idea that everyone back on Earth that they knew would be dead by the time they arrived - for settling one could take their family with them or just select people without any existing family).
  Once they get there they could setup a base of operations/colony and begin communicating back with Earth (I assume that the project itself would still be up and running).
  Ideally if we could work out communications via quantum entanglement they could have take a quantum entangled particle with them to make communications faster back to Earth. Perhaps even build some sort of router to hook the computer LAN on that side back to the internet on this side. Probably would be low-bandwidth but latency would be tolerable.
  
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Fools! by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-27 01:21 · Score: 5, Funny

Running that engine for 5 years attached to the planet already caused a diversion of 0.01 on the orbit we have around the sun! That's why the sudden global warming! Tin foil ionic hat
1. Re:Fools! by burisch_research · 2013-06-27 02:29 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Bzzt you are both wrong. The net acceleration due to this test is zero, because the ions ejected out of the engine are halted by the test chamber. Net result is zero force.
  
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How Fast? by Rob+Riggs · 2013-06-27 01:34 · Score: 2

If you had one of these on a spacecraft like Voyager with 1000kg of fuel running for 50,000 hours, what does that acceleration translate to in terms of velocity, assuming an initial velocity after launch of something like 40,000km/h?

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1. Re:How Fast? by JTsyo · 2013-06-27 02:18 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  F=ma
  .236 N = 1000 kg * a
  a = .000236 m/s^2
  
  V=V0+a*t
  V=(40,000 km/h)/(3600 sec/hr) + (.000236 m/s^2)*(50000 hours *3600 sec/hr)
  V=53,591 m/s => 192928 km/hr =>0.00018 c
How fast would it be going? by complete+loony · 2013-06-27 01:45 · Score: 2

So, if they had launched it into space, how fast would it be going after all this time? And would it still be receiving enough energy from the sun to maintain that level of thrust?

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1G of thust - you're gonna need a bigger boat by Overzeetop · 2013-06-27 02:09 · Score: 5, Informative

1G of thrust would require, as you mentioned, almost 10m/s2 of acceleration, or your mass x 10 in Newtons.
NEXT produces 236 mN of thrust at 7kW of power
A typical terrestrial nuclear power plant will produce about 1 GW of power, or enough to power 143,000 of these engines. That would result in 33,700 Newtons of thrust, able to accelerate a spacecraft at 1G weighing 3433kg.
To put that into perspective, those (143,000) engines would burn 2860kg/hr in fuel alone.

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Re:Distance estimate by abies · 2013-06-27 02:10 · Score: 3, Insightful

Don't know where you got these numbers from, but:
- There is no way this ion engine can produce 0.3g acceleration on 2000kg probe; something is way off.
- in addition to propellant, ion engine requires power - a lot of power ; you need to add weight of nuclear reactor on top of that (which is probably only thing able to produce enough power for long term with small amount of consumable fuel); for 2000N you would need something like 50MW of constant power supply
But yes, if you can create imaginary engine giving you even 0.1g of constant acceleration for spaceship over period of few decades, entire galaxy is yours.