Ion thrusters, in their various forms, offer an alternative solution – miniscule thrust, but high fuel efficiency. This tiny push won’t get you off the ground on Earth.

The current efficiency champion is the ion thruster, which has now been used on a number of spacecraft. It works by using electricity (typically generated by solar panels) to strip an electron off ...

Conversely, the theoretical limit to the exhaust velocity of an ion thruster, is limited only first by the energy available and eventually by the speed of light. 10km/s to 300,000km/s.

An ion thruster (or ion drive), one of several types of spacecraft propulsion, uses beams of ions - electrically charged atoms or molecules - for propulsion. The precise method for accelerating ...

Ion thrusters need a power source and an effective one if they will last more than a decade under thrust. The paper defined ...

Regardless, ion propulsion is real and we have it today on more than one spacecraft. However, MIT recently demonstrated an ion-powered airplane. How exciting!

Ion thrusters already have a proven track record in space, most notably on the Deep Space 1 craft that flew by the asteroid Braille and the comet Borrelly in 1999 and 2001, ...

Proving yet again that Star Trek was scarily prescient, NASA has announced that its NEXT ion drive -- NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster -- has operated continually for over 43,000 hours (five years).

The spacecraft will use specially designed T6 ion thrusters that will allow the ESA to study our galaxy’s innermost planet over a mission duration of nearly seven years.

The ion thrusters on ESA's BepiColombo spacecraft have been successfully tested in space as the probe embarks on the first leg of its epic seven-year voyage to the planet Mercury.

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 ...

Ion propulsion has even furthered the possibilities of human space exploration. In future missions, it could be used to send supplies back and forth to astronauts on Mars or other distant locations.