3 ms·
c
by hyperbovine 9y ago
c
- camiller 9y agoprobabbly a little less
- samstave 9y agoDo you have to provide it with a fuel load of noble gas that it will consume? Assume I give 1 ton of noble gas fuel in whatever format that is, how far and fast will it get before the fuel is consumed?
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoAh, got it. So when we think of “rocket fuel” we’re conflating two things: energy source and propellant. Kerosene and oxidiser gives you both heat and combustion products for the heat to fling out of your nozzle. Hall effect thrusters decouple energy and propellant. The noble gas is the propellant. It’s stuff you’re throwing. The energy, however, must come from elsewhere, e.g. solar panels or a nuclear reactor. There is an aerospace term called specific impulse [1]. It measures engine efficiency. Ion thrusters are about as efficient as the turbofans on a modern jetliner. Those, in turn, are about 12x more efficient than the Space Shuttle’s solid-fuel boosters and like 7x better than cryogenic, i.e. hydrogen-oxygen, fuelled engines. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse
- samstave 9y agoApologies then for my other reaction. I was a reactive gas...