Spacecraft Charging Simulations of Probe B1 of Comet Interceptor during the Cometary Flyby

Abstract

Comet Interceptor will be the first mission to make a flyby of a long-period or interstellar comet. After launch, the spacecraft will wait at the Sun–Earth Lagrange point L2 for a yet-to-be-discovered comet to appear. The mission comprises three spacecraft: One main spacecraft, A, developed by ESA, and two subprobes, B1 and B2, developed by JAXA and ESA, respectively. All spacecraft will carry plasma instruments for a three-dimensional sampling of the cometary plasma environment. The plasma measurements will likely be affected by the spacecraft potential and by particles emitted from the spacecraft surface. In this work, we use the Spacecraft Plasma Interaction Software and the ElectroMagnetic Spacecraft Environment Simulator to make particle-in-cell simulations of the spacecraft–plasma interactions of probe B1 in different environments during the cometary flyby. This is done for two production rates of the target comet and two relative flyby velocities of the probe. At low flyby velocities, the spacecraft potential varies from 9 V in the solar wind to −5 V in the inner coma for a comet similar to comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. For a comet similar to 1P/Halley, the potential is slightly less negative in the inner coma due to the more effective collisional cooling of the electrons in the environment. At high flyby velocities, secondary electron emissions from neutral gas impacts dominate the currents, charging the probe to positive potentials in most of the studied environments.

Keywords

• Comets
• Space plasmas