The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
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This air intake collector is designed to harvest sufficient air particles as it skims the top of the atmosphere to fuel an ‘air-breathing’ electric thruster. The aim is to help satellites to overcome atmospheric drag to operate on an ongoing basis in orbits from as low as 180 km to a maximum 250 km altitude.
This ramjet technology having been proven by ESA in principle, such Very Low Earth Orbit, VLEO satellites could provide sharper resolution Earth-observing imagery and low-latency communication links in the future.
The challenge is to design a sufficiently efficient air intake system to collect as many of the scarce but highly-energetic air molecules found at the top of the atmosphere as possible, to fuel an electric thruster to compensate for the air drag that would otherwise pull a satellite down to Earth in a matter of weeks. This was the goal of an ESA project with Belgium’s Von Karman Institute and Politechnico di Milano, developing sophisticated software models to qualify an air intake-collector design as well as manufacturing a metal prototype.
The project was supported through ESA’s General Support Technology Programme, to convert promising concepts into space-ready products.