Congratulations to Dr. Michael Keidar, professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, as well as their team for having their article “Demonstration of electric micropropulsion multimodality” published in Science Advances. This is a top interdisciplinary journal and very few papers are published!
Dr. Keidar explained the focus of the paper and shared his own thoughts: A new spacecraft propulsion system has been developed that demonstrates unusual behavior. When electric propulsion is used, thrust to power ratio is extremely important. This is because electric propulsion is power limited. Typically, when exhaust velocity increases, the thrust to power decreases. This paper demonstrates that it’s possible to have an increase in thrust to power ratio with increase of exhaust velocity. This is great recognition of the importance of this funding and electric propulsion by Science Advances.