Accelerator grid structural and electron backstreaming failures are the most important factors affecting the ion thruster's lifetime. During the thruster's operation, Charge Exchange Xenon (CEX) ions are generated from collisions between plasma and neutral atoms. Those CEX ions grid's barrel and wall frequently, which cause the failures of the grid system. In order to validate whether the 20 cm Lanzhou Ion Propulsion System (LIPS-200) satisfies China's communication satellite platform's application requirement for North-South Station Keeping (NSSK), this study analyzed the measured depth of the pit/groove on the accelerator grid's wall and aperture diameter's variation and estimated the operating lifetime of the ion thruster. Different from the previous method, in this paper, the experimental results after the 5500 h of accumulated operation of the LIPS-200 ion thruster are presented firstly. Then, based on these results, theoretical analysis and numerical calculations were firstly performed to predict the on-orbit lifetime of LIPS-200. The results obtained were more accurate to calculate the reliability and analyze the failure modes of the ion thruster. The results indicated that the predicted lifetime of LIPS-200's was about 13218.1 h which could satisfy the required lifetime requirement of 11000 h very well.

A two-dimensional particle-in-cell plasma model is built in the R-Z plane to investigate the lowfrequency plasma oscillations in the discharge channel of a 5 kW LHT-140 Hall thruster. In addition to the elastic, excitation, and ionization collisions between neutral atoms and electrons, the Coulomb collisions between electrons and electrons and between electrons and ions are analyzed. The sheath characteristic distortion is also corrected. Simulation results indicate the capability of the built model to reproduce the low-frequency oscillation with high accuracy. The oscillations of the discharge current and ion density produced by the model are consistent with the existing conclusions. The model predicts a frequency that is consistent with that calculated by the zero-dimensional theoretical model.

A 2D hybrid-PIC simulation model is proposed to investigate the beam extraction phenomena of the ion thruster. In which the electrons of the plasma sheath upstream the accelerator grid are assumed as particles while the downstream are fluid for improving the calculation efficiency. The ion transparency, plasma sheath formation, ion beam extraction characteristic of a two-and three-grid system have been compared in detail in this paper. From the comparison of the appearing time of the under-perveance phenomena in the two-and three-grid system, it illustrated that the two grid system has the wider operation range of the plasma densities than the three-grid one.

An ECR ion thruster with a diameter of 5 cm has been developed and tested. Four different antenna positions were experimentally and numerically investigated, and the results suggest that the optimal location for the antenna is where it is perfectly surrounded by the electron cyclotron resonance layer. We also evaluated two different antenna configurations, and found that the star configuration is preferable to the circular configuration, and also that the circular antenna is only 40% as efficient as the star antenna. The experimental curve of the ion beam current and voltage agrees with the fitting results from the analytic solution. The simulation of the magnetic topology in the discharging chamber with different back yoke heights indicates that it needs to be further verified.

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