New Satellite Engine Could Use Earth's Atmosphere to Stay in Orbit Indefinitely

GGordonS about 3 hours ago 8 commentsRead Article on scitechdaily.com

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Discussion (8 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

chris_va•about 2 hours ago

Very much not a new idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_low_Earth_orbit

Though fun to see. More interesting than the station keeping (indefinite part) is that it enables ~100km orbits, which are ~5x closer than what remote sensing satellites use today and thus could get 5x the resolution for the same instrument.

t2r3121•about 2 hours ago

Yes, the article also points out that the idea is not new, but rather that this research was focused on addressing practical problems, such as corrosion of the engine's parts.

metalman•about 1 hour ago

'contactless, neutralizer-less radio-frequency (RF) helicon plasma thruster'

fairly sure that wins just on the absolute impossibility of creating an acronym , just all business

works in wind tunnel testing.

tocs3•about 1 hour ago

It may never work then:)