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Thales wins contract with German Aerospace Centre for a new propulsion system for satellites

22 July 2008

The contract between Thales and DLR was signed on July 17 at DLR facilities in Königswinter, near Bonn. The project will be carried out on behalf of the German Aerospace Centre, with financial support from the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. The Components & Subsystems team of RFMS-Ulm in Germany designed this new HEMP propulsion system. The Ulm production centre has been dedicated for years to the development of traveling wave tubes for satellite communications - an area where we are world leaders. The HEMP team based in Ulm is responsible for the development, qualification and production of the system. It's in Ulm that Thales has invented the HEMP ion thruster concept in the late 1990s, with first patent releases in 1998. The new HEMP thrusters are more effective, lighter and thus more economical than usual thrusters. The compact and reliable design of the HEMP thrusters, their low degree of complexity and the reduced consumption of propellant lead to significant cost reductions in comparison with conventional propulsion systems. The HEMP thrusters operate by ionizing neutral Xenon propellant gas atoms in a plasma discharge channel and subsequently accelerating them by the applied electric field. The magnetic confinement allows such an effective acceleration that thermal loss can be minimised and thus the efficiency is optimised. As planned in the contract with DLR, a configuration of several HEMP thrusters will be deployed for position control of the SmallGeo satellite. This spacecraft is being developed and built under the ESA ARTES11 programme, in order to test new technologies for telecommunication satellites. To ensure successful operation in space, the propulsion system will be subjected to extensive testing under simulated space conditions in specially designed vacuum chambers. Both pioneer and innovator, Thales has developed breakthrough technologies to increase the performance and efficiency of space tubes. The successful diversification towards sub-systems with this new propulsion system should provide a significant contribution to space technology.