New Zealand researchers aim to combine plasma thrusters and superconducting magnets
I absolutely love how these things always look like janky scrapyard inventions, despite (usually) costing a fortune to build.
Read the article, but didn’t see anything about how much thrust is expected. Guessing this is going to be a better ion engine of low thrust/high specific impulse. Which is useful, but mostly for robots.
They are also useful for maintaining orbits (like the ISS), and could potentially be useful in long duration missions such as interplanetary transfers. If it takes months to get to Mars anyway, low thrust won’t matter if it means you get more total delta-v, and able to reduce the travel duration anyway, but of course this depends on the specifics
