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NASA Glenn Research Center在最近在运营46,000小时的长期测试里程碑的下一代离子推进器。图片来源：NASA Glenn研究中心，俄亥俄州克利夫兰
将来是否会有一段时间，我们可以将小行星从天上拉出，将其放在稳定的轨道中并探索它？
我们可能会直接看一部科幻电影中的东西，但是当我们凝视着NASA新的离子推进引擎中的Xenon气体时，我们凝视欧洲杯线上买球着凉爽的蓝光。欧洲杯线上买球科幻小说看起来好像正在成为现实。
'NASA's New Solar Electric Propulsion Engine'
The technology is part of NASA's Asteroid Retrieval Initiative, with the task of robotically pulling asteroids that are close to Earth and stabilizing them within an orbit, which we could actually explore.
Still an unapproved plan (with the president proposing in the FY14 budget) the concept is really quite spectacular and for one solar technology enthusiast, an extremely interesting insight into the power of the solar electric propulsion system.
该技术只能在太空中起作用；来自太阳能电池的高阵列从太阳中夺取能量并使用它为地球飞船产生能量。
Speaking to NASA’s Michael Patterson from the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, he described the mechanics of solar electric propulsion on board spacecraft as: ‘taking the power available from the sun and converting it into thrust and it does so by using solar arrays that can flux the photons to electrical current and that power is made available to the thrusters’.
Comparing solar technology for space travel to that of what we use here on planet earth, there is quite a difference in terms of the sophistication with the development and production of the solar technology.
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太阳能推进系统的艺术家概念。图片来源：分析机制协会
Michael Patterson (Glenn Research Center) states that ‘one of the downsides of solar-electric propulsion is that you have to use the solar arrays and solar arrays are expensive to manufacture and fly although, on the other hand, now that you have these arrays onboard spacecraft, once you are done operating a propulsion system that can be made available to the spacecraft to operate payloads and that has been a great marriage for geosynchronous communication satellites’.
He goes onto further state that ‘solar technologies [and] the arrays that are used in space are fairly sophisticated. They are relatively high-efficiency cells and many of which are implemented in a very sophisticated fashion. For example; on the Deep Space One mission we flew solar arrays that had [a] concentrator lens over the cells to increase the flux of photons for a unit area to increase the power generation of the cells.’
我确实发现有趣的是，虽然成本和需求很高，但总体效率可能会超过成本，并且，如果您的阵列与太阳的恒定角度，那么有可能获得大量能量的潜力像帕特森国家一样，是否可以使用经济利益来使用；“允许您乘坐较小的发射车，以节省大量成本，可以减少类发射车，或者它可以使您可以在航天器中增加更多有效载荷，从而产生收入。”
In terms of what goes into the production of this technology and what the solar cells are made up from, Patterson states that because they are ‘gallium arsenide solar cells [with] arrays that are high efficiency; their radiation [is] hardened and the arrays are articulated to constantly point with a decent sun angle.’
展望未来，利用小行星和探索它们的潜力仍然只是在制定中地球轨道）。
Michael Patterson (Glenn Research Center) discusses the concept as; ‘a high power solar electric propulsion system with [a] high field efficiency [that] would be launched off a very large launch vehicle, and then be able to have enough energy to be able to go out to an earth crossing asteroid [to] capture it - lasso it essentially, and retrieve it back to a stable orbit between the earth and the moon (and that requires a lot of energy and really the only practical way of doing this is with solar electric propulsion). So there’s no real energy constraint because we get our energy continuously from the sun (as opposed to stored energy in the chemical bonds of a chemical rocket)’.
太阳能推进技术是人类空间探索中使用的概念，这确实是学习的途径 - 不仅是小行星 - 而且还涉及我们如何处理超出轨道的太空探索。
当然，成本高昂，需求量很高，而且技术（并且必须）非常复杂。虽然，也许使用这种推进形式的太空旅行的长期利益可能会使我们迈出太空旅行的下一步。