Jim Cast

Headquarters, Washington, DC July 9, 1996

(Phone: 202/358-1779)

Jim Doyle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
(Phone: 818/354-5011)

RELEASE: 96-130

ENGINE BUILT TO CATCH A COMET BEGINS ENDURANCE TEST

A new NASA spacecraft engine that begins flight at less

than a snail's pace but builds up enough speed to catch a
comet will soon be used to push exploring spacecraft to the
far reaches of the solar system.

A prototype of a xenon ion engine, which fires

electrically-charged atoms from its thruster, began a nearly
year-long endurance test April 30 at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, CA.

Once validated by the test, a similar engine will power

the first New Millennium mission, called Deep Space-1, to an
asteroid and a comet in 1998. The comet will be West-
Kohoutek-Ikemura and the asteroid will be McAuliffe, named
after the school teacher Christa McAuliffe who died in the
Challenger accident.

"NASA has been experimenting with ion drive engines for

30 years," said Jack Stocky, manager of the ion propulsion
system project. "However, this test will be the most
extensively instrumented endurance test of an ion engine ever
performed."

In space, the 11.8-inch diameter engine will use the

heavy but inert xenon gas as fuel and be powered by more than
2,000 watts from large solar arrays provided by the Ballistic
Missile Defense Organization. The actual thrust comes from
accelerating and expelling the positively-charged atoms,
called ions. The thrusting action is similar to that of
chemical propellant engines which expel burning gases, except
that such engines can produce up to millions of pounds of
thrust. The engines in rockets that lift the Space Shuttle,
for instance, combine metal-warping heat with an Earth-
shaking roar and quickly lift the Shuttle to more than 17,000
miles per hour.

-more-

-2-

An ion engine, however, starts with only about 20-

thousandths of a pound of thrust. There's no roar, just an
eerie blue glow. While the atoms, charged by an electric arc
which removes one of the 54 electrons around its nucleus, are
fired in great numbers out the thruster at more than 70,000
miles an hour, their accumulative mass is so low, the
spacecraft moves only millimeters per second in its early
stages of flight.

Still, ion propulsion is more propellant efficient than

chemical propulsion because it expels molecules from the
engine at a much higher speed, Stocky said. A chemical
propulsion engine has an exhaust velocity of 10,400 miles per
hour while ion propulsion exhaust is 70,200 miles per hour.

Built at NASA's Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, OH, the

engine will be tested for 8,000 hours (330 days) in the
space-like environment of JPL's vacuum chamber. "Ion engines
have such low thrust they cannot operate in an atmosphere and
have to be tested in a vacuum," said Dr. John Brophy, user
validation assessment manager for the project. "JPL has the
technical expertise and the cost-effective facility for the
test." The test is designed to run full power for two days
and then shut off for one hour and restart. This stressing
process will be repeated until 8,000 hours of operation have
been accumulated.

After Deep Space-1 is launched by an expendable rocket

with sufficient power to escape Earth's gravity, it will be
in orbit around the Sun moving at the same speed the Earth
moves in its orbit. That means that relative to Earth, the
spacecraft will not be moving at all. But slowly, the low-
thrust ion engine will increase and the spacecraft's velocity
over time to greet its celestial target at more than 22,000
miles per hour, fast enough to rendezvous with a comet or
asteroid. The prototype ion engine carries 176 pounds of
xenon in a tank, which in flight would last from one to two
years, depending on its destination and the amount of total
thrusting required, Brophy said. Deep Space-1 will consume
only 99 pounds of xenon during its mission.

-end-