Electric Propulsion Development Activity at MELCO

MELCO has been developing electric propulsions for about 30 years under some national projects in Japan. The 20mN class xenon ion engine subsystem (IES) has arrived at the practical stage of a satellite NSSK propulsion. The IES is applied for NSSK of the engineering test satellite of JAXA, which will be launched in FY2006. Furthermore, now MELCO is developing 200mN class hall thruster and power processing unit for high power next generation satellite. The target specification is that the thrust level is over 250mN, the specific impulse is over 1,500s under the PPU input power of 5kW, and the lifetime is over 3,000 hours. To date, the development status is engineering model (EM) phase after the evaluation of breadboard model (BBM) and development model (DM). The thruster EM showed 264mN of the thrust level and 1,721s of the specific impulse under the thruster input power of 4.56kW. The PPU EM showed the anode efficiency was over 93% for 250V and 350V at output power between 1.75-4.5kW. We will start the endurance test of the thruster EM from the middle of 2006 after the coupling test between the thruster and PPU EM.