The Draconids occur annually, peaking in October. The meteors appear to be flying out of the head of the Draco the Dragon constellation — which is how they got their name. Chad Jocius, managing director of the Heide Observatory in Kenosha, said stargazers can still make their bedtimes while watching this meteor shower.
Renault is reinventing its Espace as an electric minivan concept.
The EV makes its debut at the Paris Motor Show later in October.
Tech details are scarce, but it matches a Honda CR-V for length.
The car that reinvented family transport for European drivers in the 1980s is itself being reinvented. Renault’s E-Space Concept, an electric reboot of the Espace minivan, makes its debut at the Paris Motor Show next week, and Renault’s pattern of quickly turning concepts into real production cars tells us this VW ID. Buzz rival could be in showroom two years from now.
Renault calls the newest EV a “future-focused version of the original” – that original being the boxy, fiberglass-bodied van (MPV to Europeans) from 1984. The first-generation Espace launched in Europe only a few months after Chrysler’s K-car minivans debuted in the US. More recently the Espace badge has been used on a three-row, combustion SUV, a clear sign of how far minivans had fallen out of favor.
But maybe the tide has turned. Renault clearly wants us to remember what made the original Espace great, and includes some subtle retro influenced to help us. The stubby nose features a short hood and vertical face, this time with LED lights and an illuminated Renault diamond badge, and the windshield is raked like a sports car’s.
A perfectly horizontal waist line runs through to a vertical rear end and maximizes interior space, though Renault doesn’t offer any data about seating capacity or luggage space. Previous Espace models have had both two- and three-row seating configurations, sometime with front captain’s seats that swivelled 180 degrees, and though there are no interior images yet, it looks like the concept is a two-row van.
Honda CRV-Sized
Renault hasn’t given much away in terms of tech specs, only revealing that the concept is 4.7 m (185 inches) long, making it roughly the same length as a Honda CR-V. But it previously confirmed a new RGEV platform for compact cars that gains 800-volt electrics, while costing 40 percent less to build than its current cars.
The new motor that comes with the RGEV architecture makes up to 271 hp (275 PS / 202 kW), versus 217 hp (220 PS / 162 kW) for today’s equivalent, and Renault said a range-extender option could boost electric driving range from 466 miles (750 km) to 879 miles (1,400 km).
Could Be Two Years From The Showroom
It took three years for Renault to productionize its Renault 5 concept, but only two to bring the Twingo to the road. The smaller car was developed with Chinese help to supercharge the development process. If the E-Space gets the same treatment, we could see a fully legal version on the road in Europe two years from now.
Renault’s lack of presence in the US means it won’t be offered in the US, which is a shame, because minivan sales in North America have experienced a resurgence lately. Having abandoned them for more fashionable SUVs years ago, buyers are rediscovering how useful minivans really are, with millennials the driving force behind the trend.
One Of Several Paris Debuts
The E-Space will be a major draw to Renault’s stand at this month’s Paris Motor Show, and we wouldn’t be surprised if it also had an original (above) on hand to stoke the nostalgia. But the E-Space won’t be the only draw. The brand is also showing its Gordini 8 electric coupe concept, a Twingo electric subcompact with a new Twingobay panoramic glass roof, the facelifted Scenic and Megane, and the 4 JP4x4 concept it previewed at this year’s Roland-Garros French Open tennis tournament.
How TransTech Energy modified a 30,000-gallon vertical water deluge tank for an aerospace launch facility on an accelerated timeline.
In aerospace, having equipment arrive early can be a very good problem to have.
A customer needed a 30,000-gallon vertical carbon steel tank for a launch pad water deluge system, and they needed it fast. Rather than starting with a new vessel and a traditional fabrication schedule, TransTech Energy looked to its existing tank inventory.
A near total lunar eclipse will cast an orange glow showing off the moon’s craters and details. At its peak --- which is expected at 11:12 p.m. Thursday --- 96 percent of the moon will be covered by the Earth’s shadow. The event known as the blood moon will be visible throughout Wisconsin, as long as the skies stay clear.
Technology companies are pursuing projects that would launch data centers into space — efforts called Starcloud at Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Project Suncatcher at Google.
According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, the idea is that, instead of consuming land, power and water on Earth, the orbiting data centers would harness the sun’s energy for unlimited power.
The projects are in the early stages of development, according to reporting from National Public Radio, and viability remains in question over the cost of launching servers into space, where the heat from the servers will go, and the logistics of maintaining and upgrading the technology.
While data centers in space are unlikely to happen in the next few years, studies, including one from Southern New Hampshire University, conclude space-based data centers could be a reality in the next decade.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
MIT engineers are testing a new propulsion system that combines the power and speed of conventional chemical thrusters with the precision and fuel-efficiency of electrical thrusters.
The system could enable the design of nimbler, more flexible small satellites, which could perform both fast, powerful maneuvers and slower, precise adjustments, depending on the mission and moment at hand.
The key to the new system is a special propellant that can power both chemical and electrical thrusters, which traditionally have required separate, bulky fuel sources.
“If you can have chemical and electrical propulsion in one small package, it’s the best of both worlds,” says Amelia Bruno, a former postdoc in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “This opens the door for small satellites to do even more science, more observations, and more interesting missions, all on a smaller and cheaper platform.”
Bruno is the lead author of a study appearing this week in the Journal of Propulsion and Power showing that a type of “green monopropellant” originally developed by the U.S. Air Force for use in chemical propulsion in space can also effectively power tiny “electrospray” thrusters. Electrospray thrusters are dime-sized rockets that use electric fields to charge up a liquid propellant’s particles, which are then shot into space as a thrust-generating spray.
Electrospray thrusters are extremely fuel-efficient and can perform slow and precise maneuvers, such as pushing a small spacecraft bit by bit through a long, interplanetary journey. Chemical thrusters, in contrast, require a large fuel supply to perform short and fast bursts, for instance to quickly ascend and descend, or speed up and slow down.
Now that the MIT group has found a propellant that can fuel both chemical and electrospray thrusters, they see big potential for small spacecraft. The team is working with NASA to launch the Green Propulsion Dual Mode mission — a briefcase-sized CubeSat that will carry a chemical thruster and four electrospray thrusters, all fueled by a single propellant tank. The mission will be the first to test such a two-in-one propulsion system for small spacecraft. If it is successful, Bruno says the mission could pave the way for small satellites to explore beyond Earth’s orbit.
“We could send CubeSats to Mars, or the asteroid belt, where they could make the journey slowly, using electrospray thrusters,” says study co-author Paulo Lozano, the Miguel Alemán Velasco Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. “You could then use your chemical thrusters to quickly move to look at interesting features. You could have a lot more flexibility to do a lot more things.”
The study’s co-authors also include Matthew Corrado SM ’22, PhD ’26.
A sea of ions
Lozano’s group at MIT designs, fabricates, and tests electrospray thrusters for use in satellites that range from the size of a lunchbox to a small carry-on suitcase. Compared to conventional satellites, these microsatellites are significantly smaller and cheaper to launch into space.
But smaller spacecraft require smaller everything else, including propulsion systems. In that respect, electrospray thrusters are a good fit. The thrusters Lozano develops are about the size of a thumbnail. Each thruster sits atop a small reservoir of ionic liquid propellant. When the reservoir is connected to a battery, the battery supplies some amount of voltage that electrically charges a corresponding amount of ions in the liquid. The charged particles are then channeled out of the reservoir, through the thruster’s tips and into space as a thrust-inducing spray.
Over the past decade, Lozano has tested many thruster designs, under varying conditions, and with various types of ionic liquid propellant — a fuel that is essentially made from salts that can remain in liquid form.
“Ionic liquids are very stable and can even remain a liquid in space, which not a lot of materials can do,” Bruno says. “And it’s basically a sea of ions, which is why we base our technology around it, so we can pull those ions out into an electrospray.”
Bruno and Lozano have collaborated with the U.S. Air Force, which synthesized a new kind of ionic liquid propellant — the Advanced SpaceCraft Energetic Non-Toxic propellant (ASCENT) — which was being tested in chemical thrusters. Chemical thrusters are high-force propulsion systems typically associated with launching rockets and performing hard and fast maneuvers once in space. ASCENT was designed as a “green,” less toxic alternative to hydrazine, which has been the traditional fuel source for chemical propulsion and is extremely hazardous to handle.
“ASCENT happens to be an ionic liquid mixture,” Bruno says. “And we said, hey, that’s the stuff we typically use. Theoretically, this should work. Let’s go figure out how.”
Spray and spin
In their new study, Bruno, Lozano, and Corrado tested the performance of electrospray thrusters that they fueled with ASCENT. Each thruster they used was attached to a small cube-shaped reservoir about the size of a Lego brick. They filled each reservoir with 1 gram of ASCENT, a liquid that has a viscosity similar to baby oil. They then attached a thruster to opposite sides of a CubeSat, which they set on a MagLev stand — a custom testbed that is designed to magnetically levitate a sample or device. The MagLev in Lozano’s lab is installed inside a large vacuum chamber, which the researchers can tune to mimic the conditions in space.
Over multiple experiments, the team remotely applied varying levels of voltage to activate the thrusters, which in turn produced a spray that spun the CubeSat around, like a floating, spinning top. The researchers measured the amount of thrust produced with each trial, and calculated ASCENT’s fuel efficiency as they ran the thrusters continuously over periods lasting up to 100 hours.
In the end, they found that ASCENT was able to successfully fuel each electrospray thruster. What’s more, the propellant, which was originally intended for chemical propulsion, was just as efficient as other, conventional ionic liquids at propelling electric thrusters.
“Compared to our normal electrospray propellants, ASCENT can provide similar performance in terms of thrust,” Bruno says. “Now that we know our thrusters work with ASCENT, we can start thinking of all the ways we can make them even better.”
Now that ASCENT has been proven to work in both chemical and electrical propulsion, she and Lozano say that a single tank of the fuel can be used to power both types of thrusters, all in a compact, two-in-one system that could fit within a small CubeSat. The team will test the idea with NASA’s Green Propulsion Dual Mode mission, which is scheduled to launch in November.
“This will be the first time that a satellite will have a shared propellant tank,” says Lozano, who notes that in addition to long, exploratory interplanetary missions, small satellites equipped with both chemical and electrical propulsion could also be useful for missions closer to Earth, such as for weather and climate observations.
“Say there’s a storm coming, and you’d want to deploy your constellation of small satellites to observe over one location,” he says. “You could choose to send them quickly or slowly depending on the nature of the observation. And the only way to do that is if you have two propulsion systems, which is now possible.”
These four flight unit electrospray thrusters were delivered by MIT Space Propulsion Laboratory to NASA for the upcoming Green Propulsion Dual Mode (GPDM) mission.
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