Potential Barrier in the Electrostatic Sheath Around Geotail, Cluster and BepiColombo spacecraft

B. Thiébault (1) , A. Hilgers (1) , E. Sasot (1) , Vincent Génot (2) , C. P. Escoubet (3) , H. Laakso (3) , Julien Forest (4)

1 TOS-EES - Space Environments and Effects Analysis Section, ESTEC
2 CESR - Centre d'étude spatiale des rayonnements
3 Space Science Department of ESA
4 Artenum SARL

In this paper, a fully self-consistent model of the plasma around an electron emitting central body in a spherically symmetric geometry is applied to analyse the electrostatic sheath around magnetospheric spacecraft in low density plasma. For all the case studied, it is shown that non-monotonic potential with negative potential barrier can exist. The magnitude and the location of the potential barrier in regions of the magnetosphere with large Debye length plasma are discussed.

Domaines: Astrophysique [astro-ph]; Cosmologie et astrophysique extra-galactique [astro-ph.CO]

B. Thiébault, A. Hilgers, E. Sasot, Vincent Génot, C. P. Escoubet, et al.. Potential Barrier in the Electrostatic Sheath Around Geotail, Cluster and BepiColombo spacecraft. Proceedings of the 9th Spacecraft Charging Technology Conference, April 2005, Tsukuba, Japan, 2005, pp.1. ⟨hal-00331954⟩