Simulation study of the plasma brake effect

Abstract. The plasma brake is a thin negatively biased tether which has been proposed as an efficient concept for deor-biting satellites and debris objects from low Earth orbit. We simulate the interaction with the ionospheric plasma ram flow with the plasma brake tether by a high performance5 electrostatic particle in cell code to evaluate the thrust. The tether is assumed to be perpendicular to the flow. We per-form runs for different tether voltage, magnetic field orienta-tion and plasma ion mass. We show that a simple analytical thrust formula reproduces most of the simulation results well.10 The interaction with the tether and the plasma flow is lami-nar when the magnetic field is perpendicular to the tether and the flow. If the magnetic field is parallel to the tether, the be-haviour is unstable and thrust is reduced by a modest factor. The case when the magnetic field is aligned with the flow can15 also be unstable, but does not result in notable thrust reduc-tion. We also fix an error in an earlier reference. According to the simulations the predicted thrust of the plasma brake is large enough to make the method promising for satellite deorbiting. As a numerical example we estimate that a 5 km20 long plasma brake tether weighing 0.055 kg could produce 0.43 mN breaking force which is enough to reduce the or-bital altitude of a 260 kg debris mass by 100 km during one year