No abstract

REGULUS is an Iodine-based electric propulsion system. It has been designed and manufactured at the Italian company Technology for Propulsion and Innovation SpA (T4i). REGULUS integrates the Magnetically Enhanced Plasma Thruster (MEPT) and its subsystems, namely electronics, fluidic, and thermo-structural in a volume of 1.5 U. The mass envelope is 2.5 kg, including propellant. REGULUS targets CubeSat platforms larger than 6 U and CubeSat carriers. A thrust T = 0.60 mN and a specific impulse Isp = 600 s are achieved with an input power of P = 50 W; the nominal total impulse is Itot = 3000 Ns. REGULUS has been integrated on-board of the UniSat-7 satellite and its In-orbit Demonstration (IoD) is currently ongoing. The principal topics addressed in this work are: (i) design of REGULUS, (ii) comparison of the propulsive performance obtained operating the MEPT with different propellants, namely Xenon and Iodine, (iii) qualification and acceptance tests, (iv) plume analysis, (v) the IoD.

The non-intrusive density measurement of the thin plasma produced by a mini-helicon space thruster (HPH.com project) is a challenge, due to the broad density range (between 10(16) m(-3) and 10(19) m(-3)) and the small size of the plasma source (2 cm of diameter). A microwave interferometer has been developed for this purpose. Due to the small size of plasma, the probing beam wavelength must be small (λ = 4 mm), thus a very high sensitivity interferometer is required in order to observe the lower density values. A low noise digital phase detector with a phase noise of 0.02° has been used, corresponding to a density of 0.5 × 10(16) m(-3).

No abstract

The design of a measurement system for the analysis of electric and magnetic field strength in the frequency range from few Hz up to 100 kHz is discussed. The purpose is to show how the design can be optimized in order to improve measurement performances and to simplify hardware complexity. To this aim, a system architecture is presented and the design of some system critical blocks is discussed. The proposed system can be also efficiently used for the analysis of power currents. Some meaningful results obtained by experimental tests on a suitable prototype are reported and compared with commercial systems specifications. A real-life example showing the usefulness of the proposed system for in-the-field investigations is finally described and commente