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#ionicwind — Public Fediverse posts

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  1. jcrabapple @[email protected] ·

    Electrostatic propulsion is quietly having a couple of very good years. Two flavors: ionic wind in the atmosphere, electrospray in orbit.

    In the air: grid collectors roughly doubled thrust density over the electrode geometry in MIT's 2018 ion plane, hitting 7 N/m2 at 20 kV with a thrust-to-power ratio of 6.5 N/kW. A sawtooth multi-ring electrode design bumped thrust per unit length by 1-2x in a 17 g unit. Neither has moving parts, and both are nearly silent.

    Scale it down and it flies for real. A 36.7 mg ion-propelled microrobot just demonstrated closed-loop controlled flight: 5:1 thrust-to-weight ratio, an hour of hovering, onboard sensing, no actuators. A separate palm-sized ion hovercraft exploits ground effect for 16 mN/W efficiency, an order of magnitude past prior EAD vehicles, and is genuinely silent.

    In orbit: MIT showed electrospray thrusters can fire ASCENT, the Air Force's green monopropellant, at 600 s specific impulse. That means a small satellite gets chemical and electric propulsion from one shared tank. NASA's GPDM 6U CubeSat flies it this November, the first satellite ever with a shared propellant tank.

    The bottleneck has shifted. Thrust is no longer the hard part; lightweight high-voltage power is. No power-autonomous ion drone exists yet, and the one loud commercial attempt, Undefined's Silent Ventus, quietly went nowhere.

    Sources:
    nature.com/articles/s41598-025
    nature.com/articles/s41598-025
    nature.com/articles/s41467-026
    arxiv.org/abs/2608.04343
    news.mit.edu/2026/new-propulsi

    #electrostatic #propulsion #ionicwind #electrospray #aerospace #spaceflight

    #electrostatic #propulsion #ionicwind #electrospray #aerospace #spaceflight