PHOENIX · Pioneering High-performance Orbital Engines with Non-steady Innovative ACCeleration

Over the last decades Electric Propulsion (EP) has emerged as a transformative technology in space mobility, offering significant advantages and enabling ambitious new missions. Thanks to their high exhaust velocity and fuel efficiency, EP systems have fostered the miniaturization of space assets, catalysing the rise of the New Space era.EP devices generate thrust by converting electrical energy into kinetic energy of a propellant exhausted from the spacecraft. State-of-the-art technologies, such as Hall thrusters, require an electron emitting component to neutralize the accelerated ions. This neutralizer is sensitive to contamination, which strongly constrains the choice of propellant, and is one of the critical points of failure and life-limiting factors of mature systems. Removing this component would produce a revolutionary jump in the flexibility and reliability of EP devices, paving the way toward in-situ resources utilization and pushing to new distances the horizon of humanity’s spacefaring ambitions.PHOENIX introduces a new thruster concept, the Magnetic Drawbridge Thruster (MDT), that implements, for the first time, the principle of RF acceleration for quasi-simultaneous ion and electron extraction in a ExB plasma device. By relying on the successful crossed-field configuration of Hall thrusters, the MDT would allow for high thrust densities and high exhaust velocities compared to other neutralizer-free concepts.The objective of PHOENIX is to provide the proof-of-concept of crossed-field RF plasma acceleration and to understand how to effectively implement the concept into a neutralizer-free electric propulsion thruster. With this aim, activities will focus on:1) developing simulation tools for the investigation of the novel acceleration process;2) the setup of a representative environment for MDT testing, including advanced plasma diagnostics;3) the design and test of prototypes to demonstrate the concept and to identify its core scaling laws.