a little video of an experiment I designed and developed

[Samudra Haque]

Hi Amrad community. My GWU "microthruster" experiment for NASA has
concluded recently, with good results. Here is a video that shows the first
firing of a micro-cathode arc thruster subsystem that was eventually
integrated with a PhoneSat smartphone bus, at Ames Research Center last
month.

Some of you may remember I had started work on the microprocessor control
system in 2011 and 2012, and now all of that work has been rolled into a
complete subsystem where the triggers are generated by embedded software,
and result in actual thrust impulse-bits.

*For a cool effect, please use a headphone / speaker with bass driver to
listen to the sound, in air, of the arc being produced. *The sound was
captured by accident as we were in a quiet room at the SpaceShop facility,
normally you can't hear it as the thruster is designed to work in space.* *The
effect of all THREE channels simultaneously working in precision,
generating 3 uN-s (micro-newton seconds) of thrust (in vacuum) is IMHO
visually arresting.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzYYl-b0DOFWZ1U0RFBYdU93NW8/edit?usp=sharing


I'd be happy to hear from the experienced designers out there, the next
version of this system is going to have to be very small in form factor for
fitting in a cubesat.

//samudra
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