Miniaturized Indium-FEEP Multiemitter Design and Performance

Summary A variety of multi-emission Indium Liquid-Metal-Ion-Sources have been manufactured and investigated. It was demonstrated, that such configurations are possible and allow very high peak thrusts up to 0.5 mN and possibly above. The prototypes also show promise to enable high mass efficiencies at thrust ranges in the tens of µN range, as required by missions such as SMART-2. If successful, also future Power-Processing-Units (PPU) can be simplified by using integrated multiple In-FEEP thrusters instead of clustering of individual In-FEEP thrusters for high thrusts. Acknowledgement 4All past research activities were mostly carried out by M. Fehringer and F. Rudenauer. This work wass supported in part by ESTEC-Contract 12376/97/NL/PA. 5 References 1 Genovese, A., Steiger, W., and Tajmar, M., "Indium FEEP Microthruster: Experimental Characterization in the 1-100 µN Range," AIAA Paper 2001-3788, 2001 2 Tajmar, M., Genovese, A., Steiger, W., "Indium FEEP Microthruster Experimental Characterization," Journal of Propulsion and Power, submitted (2002)