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#568
damongogul
Keymaster

    Hi AstroWill! Great to make your acquaintance. Thank you for the link.
    What kind of thrust range are you looking at for your work? One of the challenges I faced in the past was finding a way to accurately measure thrust while in vacuum. Electric propulsion is a special case since the thrust-to-weight ratio can often prohibit you from simply thrusting into a scale – the resolution might not be precise enough. It’s possible to get away with it if accuracy isn’t your main concern, though.

    The pendulum approach has worked for a few people (it worked for me with a 1-10 mN thrust range), but you need to get a handle on your heat dissipation or it will warp the measurements, especially for long-duration testing.
    Check out Brett Tartler’s work at https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/59568