Powerful ESPA Thruster for Active Debris Removal
Engineers at CUA have developed a patented Fiber-fed Pulsed Plasma Thruster (FPPT), which consumes PTFE (Teflon®) Fiber propellant from a spooled form. The thruster uses massive parallelism in its energy storage unit (ESU) design, assembling commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components into discrete modular capacitor assemblies while maintaining low per-cap specific current levels.
Discharge initiation is accomplished via a regenerative carbon igniter array located in the thruster cathode. This larger-scale model is designed for use with small satellites of the ESPA Class and can be used for active debris removal (ADR) activities.
PTFE (Teflon®) Fiber (range safety not required)
Available as ESPA unit with more than 9-month lead time
Simplicity and safety with solid inert PTFE (Teflon®) Fiber propellant
Propellant is spooled inside package and easily expanded as needed