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NASA Psyche Asteroid Mission: The Psyche aircraft launched by NASA last week as the first mission to a metal asteroid is all set to blaze a literal blue trail. The spacecraft was launched towards an asteroid of the name. 

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This bright wake probe's remarkable propulsive system will switch within the first 100 days of the mission. Hall thruster is the mechanism which will propel the Pysche through space. 

This thruster will glow blue as it ionizes xenon, a noble gas that will be used to move the spacecraft forward. The gas is also used in car headlights and plasma televisions. This is the first time such technology will be used and it has only been available for NASA spaceflight since 2015. 

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But why do engineers use this technology?

While planning space missions, engineers focus on efficiency which can be achieved through this technology. For this, the engineers turned to electric thrusters. These come in different variants. Scientists use ion and Hall thrusters. 

Dan Geobel, NASA's Psyche chief engineer in a blog post said, "There are many different types of electric thrusters, almost as many as there are different makers of cars." 

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"They can probably be considered the Tesla versions of space propulsion," he added. 

Ion thrusters use high electric voltages to make plasma and spew ions into space. NASA's Dawn mission used these ion thrusters to get to dwarf planet Ceres, but the space agency said that they're not the fastest. 

On the other hand, the Hall thrusters use a magnetic field to swirl electrons in a circle and produce a beam of ions. They don't get good mileage but the Pysche team picked it because these thrusters allow them to make a smaller and therefore more efficient spacecraft. 

The thrusters need power to work which they get from the sun via solar panels and something to ionize. 

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Now that the mission has been launched, the team will spend the next 100 days checking out all the spacecraft's systems to ensure they're ready for the journey. 

If the mission is successful, then the Hall thrusters will likely make an appearance on upcoming space missions, said Steven Scott, the programme manager for the Psyche mission at the company Maxar. As per NASA experts, by August 2029, the spacecraft will begin exploring the asteroid that scientists think – because of its high metal content – may be the partial core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet.

(With inputs from agencies)

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