Firing up Henon's engine

Beneath this ghostly green light and producing a faint blue plume sits a gridded ion engine thruster that will eventually propel the HENON mission into deep space. This high-efficiency, long duration thruster will take ESA’s first standalone deep space CubeSat far from Earth to survey space weather. Testing took place in an ESA ESTEC vacuum chamber. HENON is being developed by an international consortium of European entities, mainly from Italy and the United Kingdom.

Many R&D programmes prime the pump of European innovation: HENON is funded through the General Support Technology Programme (GSTP) which supports in-orbit demonstrations of new technologies to ensure that future ESA missions will have the right technologies available to use at the right time.