Advanced wave plasma thruster with multiple thrust vectoring capability

Wave plasma sources are very promising for various application fields owing to the flexibility and variability of their operational parameters. One of these applications is propulsion systems based on wave plasma technology. Among other wave plasma thrusters (such as Ion Cyclotron Resonance (ICR), Electron Cyclotron Resonance (ECR), and Direct Fusion, Helicon Plasma Thrusters (HPT) have gained the most attention. This interest in helicon plasma thrusters has been raised due to a number of reasons. It has been suggested that stability and the controllability of the plasma characteristics in the HPT thrusters allows for operations in a broad range of operational parameters. Furthermore, helicon plasma thrusters are supposed to be highly efficient and completely electrodeless promising high longevity since electrode material are susceptible to sputtering, erosion, and ablation when directly exposed to plasma discharge. However, the aforementioned advantages of the helicon plasma thrusters are not universally agreed upon by all researchers in this field. Regardless of the accuracy of these claims, in this study, new approaches for the enhancement of helicon plasma thruster operations are proposed. These are expected to completely eliminate problems in the current state of the art. Moreover, these new ways for efficiency improvement of helicon plasma thrusters allow to revise conventional schemes of propulsion systems with single thrust vector and to enable new space missions that require multiple thrusting capability.