2023年3月3日

本周早些时候,SpaceX公司发布更多信息的新氩霍尔推进器意志力我们V2迷你卫星,一个创新,可能与该公司2021年收购群的技术。关闭的协议,2021年7月,是一个极其罕见的举措SpaceX。群——生产和经营超小型卫星为物联网设备,仍是该公司只有21年收购历史上。也是值得注意的,因为相对来说,群还是相当年轻的公司:当交易结束时,启动有大约30名员工,120 sandwich-sized轨道卫星,刚刚住了早些时候与它的旗舰产品。但在航天工业,人才是国王,SpaceX似乎已从吸收群中获益颇丰的团队。群的两个合伙人,莎拉Spangelo和本杰明Longmier SpaceX公司高级董事的卫星工程安装。都是我们直接的一部分细胞团队,目标是利用我们星座卫星连接世界各地的智能手机。但Longmier州LinkedIn,他领导我们的电力推进集团,该集团负责工程新的氩霍尔推进器本周宣布。霍尔推进器本身并不是新的。名字指的是几十年前的推进技术。 Essentially, Hall thrusters use a magnetic field to ionize a propellant and produce plasma. Satellites employ thrusters throughout their useful life – to adjust attitude, avoid collisions with other objects, or to de-orbit at the end of the lifespan. The real innovation is in the propellant: argon. Argon is many times cheaper than xenon (the most common, and expensive, propellant used in Hall thrusters) and krypton (the propellant SpaceX used in Starlink V1 and V1.5 satellites), in part because its more plentiful. “The transition to argon was tricky, but necessary, as krypton is too rare,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk explained on Twitter. According to specs shared online, these new thrusters will also generate 2.4 times the thrust and 1.5 times the specific impulse (a measure of how efficiently the unit uses propellant, versus the thrust generated) than previous Starlink thrusters. As early as 2011, Longmier was lead authoring technical papers on electric propulsion systems that use argon gas. He also co-authored other papers on thrusters using argon and xenon as propellant. On Twitter, Longmier said that it was 556 days from thruster clean-sheet to orbit: that would mean SpaceX would’ve started work on the thrust around the end of August, 2021, very shortly after Swarm was acquired. Longmier did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.