Unipi Team Leader: Prof. Donatella Ciampini, Dipartimento di Fisica 

Hall-effect thruster is a type of ion thruster in which the propellant is accelerated by an electric field. It operates on a variety of propellants, the most common being xenon and krypton. Despite having attracted significant theoretical and experimental research since 1960, the technology has not reached a qualified status mostly due to the high system costs and the lack of test facilities. The EU-funded ASPIRE project aims to increase the technology readiness level of a 20-kW hall-effect thruster system to 6. Project work will build on the successful outcomes from another EU project called CHEOPS which is developing three different Hall-effect thruster electric propulsion systems to serve different orbits.

Coordinator

SITAEL SPA, Italy

Other participants

• THALES ALENIA SPACE FRANCE SAS, France
• AST ADVANCED SPACE TECHNOLOGIES GMBH, Germany
• MICROTEST SRL, Italy
• IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE, United Kingdom
• UNIVERSIDAD CARLOS III DE MADRID, Spain
• UNIVERSITA DI PISA, Italy
• SME4SPACE VZW, Belgium

Start date: 1 January 2021
End date: 30 June 2023
Project cost: € 3 717 041,25
Project funding: € 2 999 953,88
Unipi quota: € 450 000
Call title: H2020-SPACE-2020
Unipi role: Partner