Can you use water as rocket fuel?

In this video series I'm spending a few days with a new researcher, each episode showing you what that life is like, learning a bit about them, and learning about the topic of their thesis.

This time I'm at the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London , talking to Jesus who is experimenting with an unusual rocket fuel, water.

A plasma thruster is a specific kind that uses something called the Hall effect.

The Hall effect is the movement of charged particles when they are in a perpendicular magnetic field.

It's a very cool phenomena because you have two things. You have the electric field and the electrons trying to go to 1 area, and then you have the magnetic field. So it's like doing this kind of motion in which on one hand it wants to get out, but on the other hand it's being pushed to the circular motion and all this stuff is built up in this radius.

Students at Imperial College in London have a flight simulator that simulates the physics of motion of an aircraft.

They can model their own aircraft and see how it handles in a six axis flight simulator.

In the future, what we want to do is to put this stuff but into space.