NASA just fired up the most powerful electric thruster ever tested in the United States.


The engine is a magnetoplasmadynamic thruster. It runs on lithium metal vapor, uses high electric currents and magnetic fields to accelerate lithium plasma, and hit 120 kilowatts during testing at JPL in February.
That is 25 times more powerful than the electric thrusters currently on NASA's Psyche spacecraft.
Electric propulsion uses up to 90% less propellant than chemical rockets. The tradeoff has always been power. This test changes that equation.
The end goal is a nuclear electric propulsion system for crewed Mars missions, which NASA estimates will require 2 to 4 megawatts. Engineers plan to scale each thruster to between 500 kilowatts and 1 megawatt.
The physics has been understood since the 1960s. The hardware just caught up.
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