I am wrapping up another year of development at AIS by adding the AIS-EPPT1 micro pulsed plasma thruster and AIS-ILIS1 ionic liquid ion source electrospray thruster to my growing collection of open source electric propulsion systems. All of the design files have been released under the CERN-OHL-S V2 open hardware license like prior thruster developments, and can be found under the Manufacturing Files section on each thruster’s respective page.
It has been a heck of a year with a lot of challenges and breakthroughs, but I am glad I have been able to continue forward with AIS and push these developments to new levels, and grow since I fired my very first pulse with the AIS-gPPT1. Especially with the ILIS1, I showed that you could take a cutting edge micro electric propulsion concept like ionic liquid electrospray and build ad fire it even at home on a reasonable budget, hopefully paving the way for lowering the barrier of entry further for this exciting technology and others like it in the nanosat and picosat field.
AIS survived its first year as an official LLC, and with any luck 2021 will shape up to be a pivotal year for AIS with even more exciting and advanced breakthroughs!