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BepiColombo will be the first spacecraft to use electric ion thrusters to travel to another planet.
Four T6 ion engines provided by the British defense and technology company QinetiQ are mounted on the engine of the machine, the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM).
They work by "ionizing" an inert xenon gas, thereby removing an electron from the gas atoms to give them a positive charge.
The resulting "plasma" is attracted by electrostatic forces to a grid with an opposite negative charge and is thrown from the propeller at 90,000 mph.
Although the force produced is minimal, it can be maintained with high efficiency over a long period.
During BepiColombo's seven-year Mercury trip, his ionic thrusters will run for 4.5 years.
Two engines will fire at the same time, producing a push of 290 million dinars, the equivalent of about an ounce of force.
Unusually, the spacecraft will use energy not to accelerate, but to brake when it "falls" to the sun.
To do this, it will launch ionic thrusters in the direction of travel and will perform a complex series of overflights beyond the Earth, Venus and Mercury.
Ion readers have already been used to propel satellites into Earth orbit and missions in the deep space to asteroids.
But BepiColombo is the first interplanetary mission to rely on technology.
Jerry Bolter, project manager at Airbus Defense and Space at Stevenage, where the MTM was assembled, said: "We soon realized that BepiColumbo had to do what we wanted and go from here to Mercury, we had to have a very efficient propulsion system. If we rely on chemical propulsion, we would need 17 tons of propellant.
"The ion reader only needs 581 kilograms of propellant and represents the equivalent of 17.8 million miles per gallon."
He stated that the control unit was "very complicated" and that it involved many complex, computer-controlled electronic components to control fuel flow and pressure.
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