An ion thruster or ion drive is a form of electric propulsion used for spacecraft propulsion. It creates thrust by accelerating ions using electricity.
The Centaur is a family of rocket propelled upper stages currently produced by U.S. launch service provider United Launch Alliance, with one main active version and one version under development. The 3.8 m diameter Common Centaur/Centaur III flies as the upper stage of the Atlas V launch vehicle, while the 5.4 m diameter Centaur V is being developed as the upper stage of ULA's new Vulcan rocket.
The National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) is the French government space agency. Its headquarters are located in central Paris and it is under the supervision of the French Ministries of Defence and Research.
Vega, is an expendable launch system in use by Arianespace jointly developed by the Italian Space Agency and the European Space Agency. Development began in 1998 and the first launch took place from the Centre Spatial Guyanais on 13 February 2012.
Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) is a comprehensive space company that has 40 years of experience in helping space organizations, companies and research organizations with access to space.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp., trading as SpaceX, is a private American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the goal of reducing space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars. SpaceX has developed several launch vehicles and the Dragon spacecraft.
DART, or Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology, was a NASA sponsored project with the goal to develop and demonstrate an automated navigation and rendezvous capability in a NASA spacecraft. At the time of the DART mission, only the Russian Space Agency and JAXA had autonomous space craft navigation. Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC) was the prime contractor for construction, launch and operation of the DART vehicle with a project cost of $95 million US(2005). The contract was awarded in June 2001 and the spacecraft was launched on April 15, 2005. The mission ended prematurely, very shortly after an anomalous slow-velocity collision with its target spacecraft, having completed less than half of the original mission autonomous rendezvous objectives.
The gridded ion thruster is a common design for ion thrusters, a highly efficient low-thrust spacecraft propulsion running on electrical power. These designs use high-voltage grid electrodes to accelerate ions with electrostatic forces.
The Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC) is a research and development centre functioning under Indian Space Research Organisation. It has two units located at Valiamala, in Thiruvananthapuram of Kerala, and Bengaluru of Karnataka. LPSC is augmented by ISRO Propulsion Complex at Mahendragiri of Tamil Nadu.
PICARD is a satellite dedicated to the simultaneous measurement of the absolute total and spectral solar irradiance, the diameter and solar shape, and to the Sun's interior probing by the helioseismology method. These measurements obtained throughout the mission allow study of their variations as a function of solar activity. It launched, along with the Prisma spacecraft, on 15 June 2010 on a Dnepr launcher from Dombarovskiy Cosmodrome, near Yasny, Russia. The mission, originally planned for two years, ended on 4 April 2014.
Formation Autonomy Spacecraft with Thrust, Relnav, Attitude and Crosslink is a pair of nanosatellites developed and built by students at The University of Texas at Austin. The project is part of a program sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), whose goal is to lead the development of affordable space technology. The FASTRAC mission will specifically investigate technologies that facilitate the operation of multiple satellites in formation. These enabling technologies include relative navigation, cross-link communications, attitude determination, and thrust. Due to the high cost of lifting mass into orbit, there is a strong initiative to miniaturize the overall weight of spacecraft. The utilization of formations of satellites, in place of large single satellites, reduces the risk of single point failure and allows for the use of low-cost hardware.
ECAPS is a Swedish space company, established in 2000 by the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) and Volvo Aero with the primary purpose of developing rocket propellants safer than hydrazine, but with the same application areas. The company was acquired in 2017 and is currently part of the Bradford group of space systems companies, which is itself part of the larger AIAC group of manufacturing companies
Jason-3 is a satellite created by a partnership of the European Organisation for the Exploration of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) and National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA), and is an international cooperative mission in which NOAA is partnering with the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales. The satellites' mission is to supply data for scientific, commercial, and practical applications to sea level rise, sea surface temperature, ocean temperature circulation, and climate change.
Miniature Sensor Technology Integration-3 (MSTI-3) was a technology demonstration satellite operated by the United States Air Force. It was equipped with two infrared cameras and one visible light camera, designed to survey Earth's surface features and characterize their appearance in infrared wavelengths. MSTI-3 launched on 17 May 1996 aboard an Orbital Sciences Pegasus rocket.
Vegetation and Environment monitoring on a New Micro-Satellite (VENµS) is a near polar sun-synchronous orbit microsatellite. It is a joint project of the Israeli Space Agency and CNES. The project was signed upon in April 2005 and was launched on the 2nd of August 2017. The microsatellite, which was set to cost the ISA US$20 million and CNES €10 million, was designed and built by IAI and Rafael under ISA's supervision.
Dragon 2 is a class of reusable spacecraft developed and manufactured by American aerospace manufacturer SpaceX as the successor to the Dragon 1 cargo spacecraft. The spacecraft launches atop a Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket and returns to Earth via an ocean splashdown. Unlike its predecessor, the spacecraft can dock itself to the ISS instead of being berthed. It has two variants; Crew Dragon, a human-rated capsule capable of ferrying up to seven astronauts, and Cargo Dragon, an updated replacement for the original Dragon spacecraft. Crew Dragon is equipped with an integrated launch escape system in a set of four side-mounted thruster pods with two SuperDraco engines each. The spacecraft features redesigned solar arrays and a modified outer mold line compared to the original Dragon, and possess new flight computers and avionics. As of March 2020, four Dragon 2 spacecraft have been manufactured ; a test article named Dragonfly and three flightworthy vehicles, one of which was destroyed in an engine test.
Soyuz at the Guiana Space Centre is an ongoing ESA programme for operating Soyuz-ST launch vehicles from Guiana Space Centre (CSG), providing medium-size launch capability for Arianespace to accompany the light Vega and heavy-lift Ariane 5. The Soyuz vehicle is supplied by the Russian Federal Space Agency with TsSKB-Progress and NPO Lavochkin, while additional components are supplied by Airbus, Thales Group and RUAG.
Falcon 9 Full Thrust is a partially reusable medium-lift launch vehicle, designed and manufactured by SpaceX. Designed in 2014–2015, Falcon 9 Full Thrust began launch operations in December 2015. As of 22 April 2020 Falcon 9 Full Thrust had performed 64 launches.
ArgoMoon is a nanosatellite that will fly on NASA's Artemis 1 mission into a heliocentric orbit in cislunar space on the maiden flight of the Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft, in 2021. The satellite has the dimensions of a shoe box in CubeSat terms, it is a 6U.
Team Miles is a type of nanosatellite called 6-Unit CubeSat that will demonstrate navigation in deep space using innovative plasma thrusters. It will also test a software-defined radio operating in the S band for communications from about 4 million kilometers from Earth.
