Description
The objective of the activity is to develop, build and test a gas generator to reproduce the gas flow density and composition of a Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) environment with high fidelity for on-ground testing of air-breathing electric propulsion systems.Targeted Improvements:Enabling a European gas generators for ground testing of VLEO missions.Description: Electric propulsion technologies developed for Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) applications use the existing gases of the upper layers of the atmosphere as a propellant to generate the thrust required to offset the drag force. In order to perform reliable verification of these technologies on ground, a similar gas flow as the one collected by platforms at VLEO needs to be generated and used as the propellant in these tests.This gas flow is normally dominated by atomic oxygen, but other important elements such as oxygen, nitrogen and atomic nitrogen canalso be found. In addition, the gas flow is collected by the spacecraft at its orbiting velocity corrected by the wind vector. Previous experimental test campaigns have tried to reproduce this by using particle flow generators that make use of existing traditional electric propulsion technologies as gas sources (i.e., a Hall effect or gridded ion thruster with air/oxygen as the propellant). Today's instruments have shown significant limitations, such as a very narrow gas ionisation and velocity range, and a restriction ofthe input propellant, leading to a very limited verification capability of the electric propulsion technologies for VLEO.To overcome these limitations, this activity will develop a gas-flow generator for ground testing able to reproduce the gas flow density and composition of the Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) environment. An engineering model with critical functions (broad range of gas velocity, composition and density) will be manufactured and tested to evaluate its performance.Procurement Policy: C(1) = Activity restricted to non-prime contractors (incl. SMEs). For additional information please go to:http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Business_with_ESA/Small_and_Medium_Sized_En…