NASA just nudged its Mars ambitions forward with a lab test of a new ion engine that vastly outmuscles anything it's flown before. The lithium-fed magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thruster hit 120 kilowatts during five February test firings inside a vacuum chamber at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory—about 25 times the power of NASA's current most powerful ion engine, now pushing the Psyche asteroid mission up to speeds of 124,000mph, Space.com reports. Instead of burning chemical fuel, the MPD thruster uses electric currents and magnetic fields to hurl lithium ions out the back, building up speed over time while using far less propellant than conventional rockets, cutting down on mass, according to NASA.
"It's a huge moment for us," says senior JPL scientist James Polk, who has worked on ion engines since Deep Space 1 in the 1990s. He says the team now aims to scale the tech up to between 500 kilowatts and one megawatt (1,000 kilowatts) in the next few years, and eventually as much as 4 megawatts, enough for multiple engines to help haul crewed spacecraft to Mars. The power source is the other half of the equation. Solar panels won't be adequate far from the sun, so NASA is developing a small nuclear reactor, Space Reactor-1 Freedom, targeted for launch by 2028. That mission will pair nuclear power with a traditional xenon-powered ion engine, laying groundwork for future flights that could include next-generation MPD thrusters.
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