IT House January 1 news, according to the official news of the Celestial Satellite, on November 17, 2021, the international top scientific journal "Nature" published the results of the on-orbit demonstration test of the thruster carried on the Celestial Satellite. The article shows the successful experiment of the iodine electric thruster of the Celestial Satellite in space, successfully completes the first successful flight of the world's first iodine electric thruster, proves the feasibility of iodine as a propellant of the electric propulsion system, and is an important step in the commercial application of iodine electric propulsion technology in the field of space, which is of landmark significance.
Iodine is an ideal fuel for small satellite electric thrusters, due to the difference between the space environment and the ground environment, the working state of the iodine ion beam in space is very different from the ground state. In order to measure and verify iodine electric thrusters in the space environment, the Tianyi Research Institute cooperated with the French startup ThrustMe to successfully send the world's first iodine electric thruster developed by ThrustMe into space on November 6, 2020 using Tianyi North Aeronautical Satellite 1.
The Celestial Satellite Platform not only fully upgraded the attitude control, power supply, communications and mission planning to fully meet the requirements of the space test of the iodine electric thruster; at the same time, the Celestial Technical Team also provided perfect technical support for the on-orbit test, carrying out more than 200 orbital maneuvering missions in 6 months, with a cumulative increase of more than 60km in the positive and negative changes of the orbital semi-major axis.
IT House learned that with the successful verification of the experiment, the Celestial Satellite also has a long-term continuous orbital control capability to meet the requirements of various missions, and the cost of the thruster is much lower than that of conventional xenon fuel electric thrusters, enabling the Celestial Satellite Platform to provide better services for space research users at a lower cost.
The successful collaboration between Celestial and ThrustMe is expected to allow more satellites carrying iodine-powered thrusters to enter the space market.