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A charged tether or wire experiences Coulomb drag when inserted into flowingplasma. In the solar wind the Coulomb drag can be utilised as efficientpropellantless interplanetary propulsion as the electric solar wind sail(electric sail, E-sail). In low Earth orbit (LEO) the same plasma physicaleffect can be utilised for efficient low-thrust deorbiting of space debrisobjects (the plasma brake). The E-sail is rotationally stabilised while thedeorbiting Coulomb drag devices  According to numerical estimates, Coulomb drag devices have very promisingperformance figures, both for interplanetary propulsion and for deorbiting inLEO. Much of the technology is common to both applications. E-sail technologydevelopment was carried out in ESAIL FP7 project (2011-2013) which achieved TRL4-5 for key hardware components that can enable 1 N class interplanetary E-sailweighing less than 200 kg. The thrust of the E-sail scales as inverse solardistance and its power consumption (nominally 700 W/N at 1 au) scales as theinverse distance squared. As part of the ESAIL project, a continuous 1 kmsample of E-sail tether was produced by an automatic and scalable "tetherfactory". The manufacturing method uses ultrasonic wire to wire bonding whichwas developed from ordinary wire to plate bonding for the E-sail purpose. Alsoa "Remote Unit" device which takes care of deployment and spin rate control wasprototyped and successfully environmentally tested. Our Remote Unit prototypeis operable in the solar distance range of 0.9-4 au.  The 1-U CubeSat ESTCube-1 was launched in May 2013 and it will try to measurethe Coulomb drag acting on a 10 m long tether in LEO when charged to 500 Vpositive or negative. A more advanced version of the experiment with 100 mtether is under preparation and will be launched in 2015 with the Aalto-1 3-UCubeSat to polar LEO.

Coulomb drag devices: electric solar wind sail propulsion and ionospheric deorbiting