Bounds on current collection from the far field by plasma clouds in the ionosphere

Abstract

Plasma clouds can enhance the collection of current to a charged body in the ionosphere in two ways. The first is by providing a large collection area for ionospheric electrons to be collected. The second is by ionization of neutral gas in the vicinity of the plasma cloud. The collection of electrons across a magnetic field is examined, and it is shown that the effective collection area is limited to the region of the cloud where the magnetic field effects are overwhelmed by the electric field effects from the charged body. Upper and lower bounds are obtained for the radius of the core region where the electric field influence dominates. From these, upper and lower bounds are obtained for the current collection.

Theory of plasma contactors in ground-based experiments and low earth orbit

“…Previously, it has generally been assumed that a substantial currentof ambient electrons can be collected only from field lines that pass through the inner coreregion [2,4]. However, we willshow in Section4 that forconditions in low earth orbitit may also be possibleto collect a significant electroncurrent from the outer core region, where the anisotropyclueto the magnetic field isimportant.…”

A Mission Concept to Determine the Magnetospheric Causes of Aurora

“…Firing the beam will result in a fraction of a Coulomb of negative being removed from the spacecraft in a time on the order of 1 s. A substantial computer-simulation-based research effort (Delzanno et al, 2015a; Delzanno et al, 2015b;Delzanno et al, 2016;Lucco Castello et al, 2018), supported by laboratory experiments (Miars et al, 2020), has demonstrated that the operation of a plasma contactor releasing a high-density charge-neutral plasma plume before and during a beam firing can greatly mitigate the charging of the spacecraft during the beam operation. Contrary to prior discussion of an emitted plasma plume acting to collect charge from the ambient plasma (e.g., Hastings and Blandino, 1989;Gerver et al, 1990;Williams and Wilbur, 1990;Davis et al, 1991), the research effort demonstrated that the surface of the plasma plume acts as an ion emitter, producing an ion current equal to the current of the electron beam.…”

Ionospheric Physics

“…As these studies apply primarily to plasma physics, only a categorization and references are given below. Various aspects of the plasma vehicle interaction, i.e., wake, charging, sheath, were studied (Lai et al, [1987]; Samir et al, [1987]; Okuda and Berchem [1988]; Singh and Kwang [1988]; Hastings and Blandino [1989]; Katz et al,[1989]; Kaufman et al, [1989]; Ma and Schunk [1989]; Murphy and Katz [1989]; Murphy et al, [1989]; Myers et al, [1989]; Samir et al, [1989]; Senbetu and Henley [1989]; Tribble et al, [1989] Kellogg et al, [1990]; Neubert et al, [1990a,b]; Svenses et al, [1990]). Chemical releases leading to plasma modifications and neutral clouds were reported by Bernhardt [1987]; Bernhardt et al, [1987]; Grebowsky et al, [1987a,b]; Hunton et al, [1987]; Lai et al, [1988]; Eccles et al, [1989]; Lai and Murad [1989]; Paterson and Frank [1989]; Elgin et al, [1990]; Gilchrist et al, [1990]; Jacobson et al, [1987]; Ma and Schunk [1990]; Pike et al, [1990].…”