Abstract
REGULUS is an Iodine-based electric propulsion system. It has been designed and manufactured at the Italian company Technology for Propulsion and Innovation SpA (T4i). REGULUS integrates the Magnetically Enhanced Plasma Thruster (MEPT) and its subsystems, namely electronics, fluidic, and thermo-structural in a volume of 1.5 U. The mass envelope is 2.5 kg, including propellant. REGULUS targets CubeSat platforms larger than 6 U and CubeSat carriers. A thrust T = 0.60 mN and a specific impulse Isp = 600 s are achieved with an input power of P = 50 W; the nominal total impulse is Itot = 3000 Ns. REGULUS has been integrated on-board of the UniSat-7 satellite and its In-orbit Demonstration (IoD) is currently ongoing. The principal topics addressed in this work are: (i) design of REGULUS, (ii) comparison of the propulsive performance obtained operating the MEPT with different propellants, namely Xenon and Iodine, (iii) qualification and acceptance tests, (iv) plume analysis, (v) the IoD.
Highlights
The fluidic subsystem is composed of a tank where the propellant is stored in solid state, a manifold that acts as flow regulator, and an injector that interfaces the subsystem with the Magnetically Enhanced Plasma Thruster (MEPT)
This work is devoted to the description of the design, the performance, and the In-orbit Demonstration (IoD) of REGULUS
The propulsive performance has been evaluated while feeding the MEPT with Xenon and Iodine propellants
Summary
CubeSats have become increasingly common in recent years provided the dramatic reduced cost in respect to conventional satellites [1]. In 2019 the I2T5 from ThrustMe [12] was the first Iodine propelled cold gas thruster ever tested in orbit; it was integrated on a 6 U CubeSat. In the last decade, particular effort has been put in studying and developing Iodine-based propulsion systems targeted at CubeSats and SmallSats [12,13,14,15,16]. Iodine and Xenon propellants guarantee comparable propulsive performances; this has been proven at least for gridded-ion and Hall-effect thrusters [14, 18]. For these reasons, the use of Iodine might be the breakthrough for the widespread diffusion of propulsion units for CubeSats and SmallSats.
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