The Chinese Hall thruster can only push a piece of paper

What you may not know is that the thrusters on the Chinese space Station only produce enough force to push a piece of paper.

Some people would say it must be nonsense. How can a spacecraft that big have such weak thrusters?

In fact, not only the Chinese space station, but many of the vehicles that humans have built in space, their thrusters are not as powerful as we would like them to be.

Why are rocket thrusters so weak when they shoot sparks out of a space station?

This is because the environment of space is completely different from the earth, and sometimes a small force can change the direction of the spacecraft.

Power in space

The space station uses Earth's gravity to orbit, but sometimes it needs to change direction, so it uses its own thrusters.

A LOT OF PEOPLE THINK SPACE STATIONmaster GETS SO huge, NEED VERY BIG power ABILITY TO DRIVE FOR SURE.

The idea is true on Earth, where rockets like the Tiangong Space Station need to burn fuel to generate a huge amount of thrust; But in space, you don't need that kind of power.

First of all, there is no gravity in space, it's a perfectly weightless situation, if there is no external force or the force is balanced, the vehicle stays stationary or moves in a straight line at a constant speed.

At this point, any external force applied will produce an acceleration, which will change the motion of the object.

Secondly, there is no air resistance in space, so there is no need to spend extra energy in these places, which can convert the supplied energy into kinetic energy.

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, NASA was afraid of running out of fuel, so it brought a lot of fuel to the lunar lander, and only used half of it.

Finally, the thrusters used in space do not use fuel. Space is a vacuum environment, can not ignite, if you want to ignite, you need to carry an accelerant, which will lead to carrying heavy items.

To know the space instruments of heaven, it is a little light on the light, never take more than a gram.

With fuel propulsion, our current Tiangong series would weigh at least twice as much.

So, the space station is driven by electromagnetic force, by the Hall effect, so it's called the Hall thruster.

Hall type propeller

When electrons enter a magnetic field, they are deflected, causing them to land in a certain area, creating a potential difference that is necessary for current to occur.

In other words, by carrying a magnetic field into space, electricity can be generated. If you accelerate the particles with an electric current, you get a high velocity stream of particles.

Hall thrusters work like this, using magnetic fields to accelerate particles, creating a stream of energetic particles that can be ejected from one place to provide power.

Although they're called particles, they're very fast, but because they're so small in mass, they produce enough energy to push only a piece of paper on Earth.

Put in the vacuum of space, however, and you can propel a huge space station.

The Hall Thruster's particles come from xenon, a rare gas, and xenon lamps are one of the more popular lighting devices on the market.

Xenon gas is easily ionized, and the hernia lamp, which operates at A current of only 3.5A, produces A strong white arc light, similar to daytime sunlight.

Our common car headlights are filled with xenon gas, allowing them to illuminate the road in THE dark.

Xenon gas added to a Hall thruster ionizes it with a single voltage, creating charged particles.

The particles are then speeded up by an electric current, steered by a magnetic field, and eventually ejected to create a driving force.

The speed of the particles can be controlled by an internal electric current, so that the energy of the ejected particles can be controlled, so that the force of propulsion can be adjusted.

Such thrusters could be used not only on the space station, but also for asteroid exploration, as well as future bases on the moon and Mars.

It can be said that the future of the human sea stars, can not do without Hall propeller.

The Hall thruster of the Chinese space station has two parts. One is its electric field, which converts solar energy into electricity through solar panels.

In addition, the core contains a backup battery that can provide power to the thrusters if the solar panels fail or if they happen to run away from the sun.

The other part is the propeller's magnetic field, which is not mounted with a magnet on Earth, but an electromagnet that uses electricity to generate a magnetic field, again from the sun and a spare battery.

The advantage of electromagnets is that they can control the size of the magnetic field by controlling the current, so as to change the deflection of particles. This is more flexible than mounting fixed magnets.

It may seem to many that Hall is a new technology, but it is not. It was originally developed by former Soviet engineer Alexander Tsiolkovsky for high altitude.

Until the 1950s and 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union in the space race, valued the Hall effect of energy saving, so vigorously developed Hall thrusters.

However, the Hall thruster is not perfect, and it still has several weaknesses that need to be improved.

Hall thrusters work with it

Improvements to the Hall thruster

The first is the source of particles used by the Hall thrusters, xenon ionization.

Xenon is good, but in small quantities. It is a rare gas, and its atmospheric content is almost negligible.

Human xenon mainly comes from nuclear fission. Xenon atoms are born at the site of atomic explosions. Xenon comes from the fission reaction of massive atoms.

Such sources make xenon very expensive.

Instead of xenon, scientists have tried to use other noble gases, such as krypton, which is cheaper, in Space X's Starlink program.

Second, Hall thrusters have a very short life span, and the high-energy ion beam has a huge amount of energy, which acts as a "cutting" effect like a fast-moving water column.

So every 100 hours, the Hall thrusters are "corroded" by 1 millimeter, and at most Hall thrusters, they have a service life of a few thousand hours or less.

At the end of its life, the Hall thrusters will be discarded, and the entire spacecraft will either have to be replaced or abandoned.

According to the attitude of the previous countries to the space station, humanity has basically chosen to abandon.

Hall thruster protection

And finally, the Hall thruster's force break point is too small.

The Hall thruster of the Tiangong Space Station has a thrust of 1 Newton, and the thruster before it has a force of a few tenths of a Newton.

If you want to achieve the future star sea travel, at least need to be hundreds or even thousands of times larger than the present.

This is a very big challenge for Hall thrusters.

The propulsion system on the spacecraft

Propeller of the future

Of all human propulsion systems, fire propulsion still produces the most power.

Thermal propulsion systems are limited to Earth, and it's not very practical to use chemical fuels in space, especially with the time required for interstellar travel.

For example, the Voyager series of probes, which have been in space for more than 40 years, use a nuclear battery system instead of chemical fuel.

Nuclear batteries, also known as isotope batteries, use the fission reaction produced by plutonium isotopes to obtain a large amount of heat, and then convert the heat energy into electricity.

Nuclear batteries use nuclear fission

Nuclear batteries have a long life, typically lasting 60 to 80 years, but because the Voyager probes used up a lot of extra power from observing astronomical objects before that, both of them will run out of power in 2025.

A probe without power is a stray piece of "space junk" that follows its previous path until new forces are applied to it, changing its course.

Voyager One

The X3, which humans are testing, has broken the five-Newtonian barrier to 5.4 Newtons, requiring 100 kilowatts of power, enough to run on Mars.

Before heading to the starry sea, we need to test the waters of the nearest celestial body, the moon has already landed, and the next step is Mars.

Maybe this is the Hall Thruster even if you can only return a piece of paper, you can still blow it, because the Hall thruster in Tiangong is already the ceiling of the existing Hall series.

Explore the sea of stars

It gave people hope that they could go to the stars and the sea.