In-space propulsion of spacecrafts and satellites are provided by specially designed thrusters that operature efficiently in vacuum environment of interplanetary-space or earths orbit. In order to develop and test thrusters to be deployed on spacecrafts or satellites, vacuum facilities that provide the vacuum environment that is similar to the environment in low earth orbit are used. In this project, the acquisition and construction of a vacuum facility that is going to be used in the development and testing of in-space propulsion systems are made. The constructed vacuum facility should provide the vacuum environment that is similar to the environment in low earth orbit even when a thruster is in operation inside the chamber (when releasing gas into the chamber). The vacuum facility will primarily be used to develop electric spacecraft thrusters that run on Xenon or Argon propellants. Thus, as a baseline requirement the vacuum facility (1.5m in diameter, 2m in length) should employ pumping systems that is well suited to pump Xenon and Argon gases and maintain a vacuum level of 2x10−5 Torr when 1 mg/min of gas is being released by the thruster.

This BAP project had a total budget of 222k TL. This project has officially began on April 9, 2012 as a 1 year project. It was granted a 1 year extension. It was succesuly closed in March, 2014. There was about 26k TL unspent money in this project’s budget, but it was not possible to spend it due to autorization issues.