Gridded ion thrusters have seen plenty of use, too. NASA’s NSTAR ion engine was installed on the Deep Space 1 probe, which was sent out to fly by a comet and asteroid in the late 1990s.

Hence an electric propulsion system is also referred to as an ion engine. You may like Psyche spacecraft's sci-fi thrusters suffer glitch on way to metal-rich asteroid; ...

Deep Space 1 has operated its ion engine between 520 watts and 1.9 kilowatts, in part depending upon the spacecraft's distance from the Sun during its flight in space.

In this historical photo from the U.S. space agency, a xenon ion engine is photographed on Jan. 1, 1999, through a port of the vacuum chamber where it was being tested at NASA's Jet Propulsion ...

An ion engine several times more powerful than any previously flown is being tested by NASA. It could propel a spacecraft all the way to Saturn’s moon Titan.

The Dawn spacecraft's ion propulsion system could attain the same speed with only 25 kg of xenon, but would take nearly 100 days of continuous thrust to reach that velocity.

Rocket A shoots all the fuel at once (again, like a nuclear propulsion engine) with a fuel speed of u and rocket B shoots two blobs of fuel—first a shot of m/2 and another one of m/2. Both start ...

"Iodine ion engine." Say that 10 times really fast. X. Your Guide To a ... The breakthrough of ion propulsion. For a spacecraft to move forward, it needs to propel something backward.

The ion propulsion engine on NASA's Deep Space 1 probe has been running for more than 200 days since the craft's launch in October 1998, propelling the tiny spacecraft more than 206 million miles ...

Spacecraft powered by electric propulsion could soon be better protected against their own exhaust, thanks to new supercomputer simulations. Electric propulsion is a more efficient alternative to ...