Experimental Study on the Effects of Discharge Chamber Length on 5 cm Radio-Frequency Ion Thruster

For keeping microgravity level of microgravity and space science satellites, a kind of electric thruster, the radio-frequency ion thruster (RIT) has been designed and applied. The RIT produces thrust through ionizing neutral particles in the discharge chamber and extracting ions by the ion optics system. The length of discharge chamber affects the ionization of neutral particles as well as the performance of RIT. In this paper, an experimental...