The technology could be used to power a return trip to Mars without refuelling, Xinhua news agency reported.
A former University of Sydney student, Paddy Neumann, and his alma mater have developed an ion thruster, a small rocket engine on a spacecraft. It can be used to make alterations in spacecraft's flight path or altitude and to replace the current chemical-based rocket propulsion technology, which requires huge volumes of fuel to be loaded onto a spacecraft.
Professor Marcela Bilek, one of the co-inventors, said they built a system in the early 2000s that was a "cathodic arc pulsed with a centre trigger and high ionisation flux".
At that stage of the project, it was basically a machine the size of a fist that spat ions from a very hot plasma ball through a magnetic nozzle at a very high velocity.
"We've been testing on Earth in a vacuum system to simulate space, but it's a small vacuum system, so this will be the first real test of a true space environment with on-board monitoring of the system," Bilek said.
It will be placed in a module outside the ISS, powered, as Neumann describes, by an extension cord from the station.
