Bimodal Propulsion System for Small Spacecraft: Design, Fabrication, and Performance Characterization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The use of multimodal space propulsion has the benefit of increasing satellite mission flexibility with the ultimate goal of decreasing mission development costs. The present paper explores the development of a dual-mode thruster for small spacecraft. By combining an electrospray within the confines of a cold gas nozzle, the fabricated and tested propulsive device can operate either in a high thrust or high specific impulse mode. The thruster herein makes use of a laser microfabricated porous glass triangular prism electrospray emitter using passively fed ionic liquid as propellant. The electrospray performance has been indirectly quantified with beam current measurements on the order of at an extraction voltage of 2.5 kV, which correlates to a significantly lower thrust than expected. For the second thrust mode, cold gas thrust and specific impulse were measured directly to be 7.9 mN and 44 s, respectively, using nitrogen propellant. The operation of this device in both modes has exemplified its potential applicability to microspacecraft while demonstrating the tradeoffs of bimodal thruster design.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".