Technical Notes VX-200 Magnetoplasma Thruster Performance Results Exceeding Fifty-Percent Thruster Efficiency

IGH-POWER electric propulsion thrusters can reducepropellant mass for heavy-payload orbit-raising missions andcargo missions to the moon and near-Earth asteroids, and they canreduce the trip time of robotic and piloted planetary missions [1–4].TheVariableSpecificImpulseMagnetoplasmaRocket(VASIMR®)VX-200 engine is an electric propulsion system capable ofprocessing power densities on the order of 6MW

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