John E. Foster, PhD.

John E. Foster received his B.S. in physics from Jackson State University (1991) and his Ph.D. (1996) in applied physics at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

In total, he has worked on ion thrusters and electric propulsion devices science for 30 years. His graduate work involved understanding anode power deposition in magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters. This work involved understanding and improving the efficiency of this device. Throughout his academic and professional career, he has been involved in electric propulsion (EP) research, studying thrusters from each of the categories of plasma propulsion: electrothermal, electrostatic, and electromagnetic.

After graduation from Michigan, he served as the plasma diagnostics postdoc for the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Plasma-Aided Manufacturing. There he used a variety of optical and electrostatic diagnostics to study capacitive, inductive, DC-magnetron, and microwave plasma discharges.

He later joined the On-Board Propulsion group at NASA Glenn to study advanced, plasma-based propulsion. There his work focused on the design of ion thruster discharge chambers including small engines such as the 8-cm gridded ion engine, NEXT ion thruster and larger higher power variants as well as the application of various diagnostics for both discharge and plume measurements. He served as the PI for the ion thrusters then slated to be used on the Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter mission. Under that program, he designed and tested the largest ECR ion thruster ever built. He also designed and tested the plasma diagnostics suite for the NASA NEXT ion thruster array, a multi-thruster array configured to simulate the Titan orbiter mission.

He left NASA (2006) to join the nuclear engineering department at the University of Michigan. His research at Michigan includes space propulsion and environmental plasma processing including water purification using plasmas.

Dr. Foster’s support of DWP includes discharge chamber magnetics modeling and ion optics electrostatics modeling.