On February 26th, at 09:59:00 UTC, one of the UWE-4 NanoFEEP thrusters, developed by TU Dresden and Morpheus Space, was successfully ignited. This is the first time an electric propulsion system has been activated on board of a 1U CubeSat in space.
A voltage of more than 5kV has been produced by the power processing unit causing a thruster emitter current of 40µA. For this very first firing a duration of 30s was intended.
Primary mission: accomplished!
Within the next days, experiments with the propulsion system for a characterization of the thrusters will be conducted.
Thank you very much for your support! Especially the directly injected messages into our server using the decoding tool by Mike (DK3WN) help us a lot with our daily operations!
Kind regards,
The UWE 4 Team