Hall plasma thruster development for micro and nano satellites

Hall thrusters are one of the most successful electric thrusters for space application that has been developed until now. The Plasma Physics Laboratory of the University of Brasília (UnB) has been developing a Permanent Magnet Hall Thruster (PHALL) for the Brazilian Space Program since 2004. Recently we have achieved important experimental results satisfying our initial goals of generating a force above 40 mN with powers around 620 W. We will discuss in this article possible applications of this thruster to nano and microsatellites with powers above 50 W. Meanwhile, a complete description is given of our present and future installations where the new thruster will be tested; taking advantage of our new 1.5 m diameter vacuum chamber (the old chamber had 0.5 m in diameter), which intends to test our thruster in the most realistic conditions, including mounting and testing on a 3U CubeSat structure, which is where we intend to start testing our thruster in a real mission in space. (paper)