The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission is on its way to Mercury, but instead of coasting to the smallest planet in the Solar System, it will be helped along by four state-of-the-art ion thrusters developed ...

The very name of the T6 ion thruster sounds like something from sci-fi. But it’s very real, and this little engine will be one of four that take the European Space Agency’s BepiColombo spacecraft to ...

A ground-breaking Solar Electric Propulsion System (SEPS) developed and manufactured by an industrial consortium led by British company QinetiQ, will provide the engine power behind the BepiColombo ...

The simplest way to explain the space exploration benefit of an ion thruster over a rocket is to compare them in simple “Tortoise and the Hare” style: The faster of the two – in this case, the rocket ...

There's no air to breathe, it's 400 degrees Celsius and you are six long years away from home. Welcome to Mercury, the smallest and perhaps most mysterious planet in the Solar System. The European ...

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