In Star Wars, the spacecraft of the galaxy far, far away are propelled through space by massive engines glowing bright blue. Current spacecraft may pale in comparison, but the technology that powers ...

Today, we use ion thrusters to correct satellite orbits and visit asteroids. In 100 years, we might be using them to propel massive generation ships that send colonists to a different part of the ...

Aerojet, a GenCorp (NYSE:GY) company, announced today that its innovative ion propulsion engine – built in partnership between Aerojet and NASA’s Glenn Research Center – has completed a test series ...

During a visit to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), I had the privilege of seeing a new experimental ion propulsion rocket engine test. A Xenon ion propulsion engine (Image courtesy of NASA) ...

Scientists at the European Space Agency have created a miniaturized ion thruster that's capable of keeping a satellite steady while in Earth's orbit. Liquid metal forming on a tiny spiked crown made ...

A UCLA doctoral student aspires to make space travel more accessible by reducing the size of spacecraft-propelling technology. Stephen Samples, who studies mechanical and aerospace engineering, is ...

A thruster that's being developed for a future NASA mission to Mars broke several records during recent tests, suggesting that the technology is on track to take humans to the Red Planet within the ...

Engineers assemble the NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) before it begins its 5.5-year endurance test. The thruster generates small amounts of thrust using xenon gas that is ionized and ...

A thruster that's being developed for a future NASA mission to Mars broke several records during recent tests, suggesting that the technology is on track to take humans to the Red Planet within the ...

An unfortunate property of science-fiction is that it is, tragically, fiction. Instead of soaring between the stars and countless galaxies out there, we find ourselves hitherto confined to this planet ...

The X3 thruster was designed by researchers at the University of Michigan in cooperation with NASA and the U.S. Air Force. It is a Hall thruster — a system that propels spacecraft by accelerating a ...

The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission is on its way to Mercury, but instead of coasting to the smallest planet in the Solar System, it will be helped along by four state-of-the-art ion thrusters developed ...