NASA's New Ion Thruster Breaks Records, Could Take Humans to Mars In Just 40 Days
NASA’s new X3 thruster, which is being developed by researchers at the University of Michigan in collaboration with the agency and the US Air Force, has broken records in recent test. It’s hoped that the technology could be used to ferry humans to Mars. The X3 is a type of Hall thruster, a design that uses a stream of ions to propel a spacecraft.
Plasma is expelled to generate thrust, producing far greater speeds than are possible with chemical propulsion rockets, according to NASA. A chemical rocket tops out at around five kilometers per second (1.86 miles/sec), while a Hall thruster can reach speeds of up to 40 kilometers per second (25 miles/sec). This kind of increase is particularly relevant to long-distance space travel, like a prospective voyage to Mars.
In fact, project team leaders project that ion propulsion technology such as this could take humans to the Red Planet within the next 20 years. Ion engines are also more efficient than their chemical-powered counterparts, requiring much less propellant to transport a similar amount of crew and equipment over large distances. Alec Gallimore, the project lead, stated that ionic propulsion can go around ten times farther using a similar amount of fuel in an interview with Space.com.
There are of course many other forms of deep-space travel on the table. The flaw of chemical-based designs is the need to bring the chemical fuel with them into space, which adds more mass that needs more fuel to lift into space, and so on. A Bussard ramjet, which is a type of fusion rocket, collects diffuse hydrogen in space with a huge scoop, which means, since its fuel is picked up en route, that it could approach light speed.
Read more: http://www.thespaceacademy.org/2017/10/nasas-new-ion-thruster-breaks-records.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
That method of propulsion has been around for a while! Nothing new...
From the Wikipedia article:
The first person to mention the idea publicly was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1911.[3] However, the first document to consider electric propulsion is Robert H. Goddard's handwritten notebook in an entry dated September 6, 1906.[4] The first experiments with ion thrusters were carried out by Goddard at Clark University from 1916–1917.[5] The technique was recommended for near-vacuum conditions at high altitude, but thrust was demonstrated with ionized air streams at atmospheric pressure. The idea appeared again in Hermann Oberth's "Wege zur Raumschiffahrt” (Ways to Spaceflight), published in 1923, where he explained his thoughts on the mass savings of electric propulsion, predicted its use in spacecraft propulsion and attitude control, and advocated electrostatic acceleration of charged gases.[3]
A working ion thruster was built by Harold R. Kaufman in 1959 at the NASA Glenn Research Center facilities. It was similar to a gridded electrostatic ion thruster and used mercury for propellant. Suborbital tests were conducted during the 1960s and in 1964, the engine was sent into a suborbital flight aboard the Space Electric Rocket Test 1 (SERT 1).[6][7] It successfully operated for the planned 31 minutes before falling to Earth.[8] This test was followed by an orbital test, SERT-2, in 1970.[9][10]
An alternate form of electric propulsion, the Hall effect thruster was studied independently in the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. Hall effect thrusters had operated on Soviet satellites since 1972. Until the 1990s they were mainly used for satellite stabilization in North-South and in East-West directions. Some 100–200 engines completed missions on Soviet and Russian satellites until the late 1990s.[11] Soviet thruster design was introduced to the West in 1992 after a team of electric propulsion specialists, under the support of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, visited Soviet laboratories.
Some older members may actually remember the Walt Disney program: Mars and Beyond in 1957. Dr. Wernher von Braun described a fleet of ion-propelled spacecraft that could journey to Mars in 400 days. This latest version of ion propulsion could beat that by about six months.
I see Henny Penny is alive and well, and posting on DU. 
