Electrostatic potential and density estimation around an ionospheric satellite

Abstract

This work presents the electrostatic potential distribution around a spherical ionospheric satellite by solving Poisson's equation through a finite difference method. The approximate numerical densities for ions and electrons are obtained as one solves the Boltzmann's equation by means of the characteristics method. It is shown that the use of a local planar approximation for the numerical electron density gives reasonably accurate results compared with the radial approximation, which has been used in former works.