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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

By the time its odyssey ended this month in the Australian outback, the spacecraft Hayabusa had been gone three years longer than planned, lost its main engine, disappeared from all interplanetary ...

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.

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 ion engines used on Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft to the asteroid Itokawa use 22 mN, while those used on the European Space Agency’s SMART-1 Moon probe operated at 70 mN.

A futuristic engine on an experimental spacecraft has racked up more operating time in space than any previous ... Ion-powered spacecraft sets flight record. Artist's concept of Deep Space 1 ...

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; ...