ABSTRACT
According to the failure mechanism, the failure modes for ion thruster can be divided into accidental failure modes and wear-out failure modes. The occurrence for accidental failure modes is mainly because the devices are subjected to the exceeded voltage, temperature or pressure environment, which can be avoided by adjusting the operating parameters and environment suitable for working correctly. However, wear-out failure modes
1 INTRODUCTION
Ion thruster is an advanced stand-alone system for space propulsion. Commercial applications of electric propulsion include north-south and east-west station-keeping, attitude controlling, momentum dumping, de-orbit and orbit raising. The lowthrust nature of electric propulsion results in the requirement for very long thruster operating times for deep-space missions. Required operating times of thousands of tens of thousands of hours are typical. Due to small sample size, long service life and diverse failure modes characteristics, having a scientific evaluation on its working life and reliability by the traditional reliability assessment methods is necessarily inadequate. Therefore, in order to provide guidance and technical support for reliability modeling and assessment of long life, high reliability electric propulsion system, systematic assessment method for ion thruster is discussed in this paper.
