For many planets in binary or trinary systems, the two stars are so far away from each other, the people living on the planet might not even realize they’re in a multi-star system. In these cases only one star would radiate meaningful amounts of light and heat.

The thumbnail shows a hall effect thruster, highly efficient, very low thrust. Plasma thrusters are supposedly a very different beast. Plasma thrusters lay somewhere between the Hall effect ion thrusters and chemical rockets in efficiency, but with variable thrust, so they can do constant thrust like ion thrusters, or can scale up to high thrust like a chemical rocket (but would require a massive amount of power for that).

I’m really glad this story ends with a silver lining. I’d say that it’s a near certainty that they’ve successfully collected the data they needed. Over time our tools for analysis only get better. Sometimes we sit on data for years before we develop the ability to properly analyze it, but we get there.