TECH
Introduction to Electric propulsion and Hall thrusters
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Electric propulsion
Electric propulsion is a way of propulsion that converts electrical energy into thrust. Electric propulsion is widely utilized in SpaceX Starlink, NASA Psyche mission, and JAXA Hayabusa mission.
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Hall thrusters
Hall thrusters are electric propulsion devices that generate thrust by the electrostatic acceleration of ions, which are produced by the electron-neutral collisions of ExB drifting electrons.
Hall thrusters features high specific impulse (~1500 s) compared to chemical propulsion and high thrust-to-power ratio (50-60 mN/kW) compared to other electric propulsion devices. Thus, Hall thrusters are becoming the main stream of modern satellite electric propulsion, including Starlink, OneWeb, and Kuiper.
Three features of Cosmo Bee
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Center of Hall thruster R&D in Korea
Drawing on the expertise of high-quality researchers and built on R&D heritage over 20 years from prof. Wonho Choe's research group, Cosmo Bee develops more efficient and customized Hall thrusters.
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Performance measurement & Plasma diagnostics system
Cosmo Bee is equipped with mN-class thrust measurement systems to assess the performance of Hall thrusters and various plasma diagnostics (Faraday probe, retarding potential analyzer, laser induced fluorescence, optical emission spectroscopy etc.) to enhance the performance of Hall thrusters.
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Electric propulsion total system
Cosmo Bee develops and provides not only Hall thrusters, but also electric propulsion total solutions which is incorporated with cathodes for electric propulsion, a propellant management unit (PMU), and a power processing unit (PPU).