Building Better Engines

For those times when spacecraft need engines there’s a type of engine called ion thrusters that uses less fuel than chemical rockets. Unlike chemical rockets, which push a spaceship by burning fuel and expelling the resulting hot gasses ion thrusters use electricity gathered from solar cells to generate electric fields that push ions away from the spaceship.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed ion thrusters that use MEMS devices to accelerate charged nanoparticles. This Nanoparticle Field Extraction Thruster or NanoFET is designed to allow it to last longer than other types of ion thrusters and allow multiple NanoFETs to be clustered together. This could simplify the job of spacecraft engineers by allowing the same thruster design to be used on spacecraft over many different missions just by changing the number of NanoFETs mounted on the spacecraft.