Laboratory Experiment of Plasma Flow Around Magnetic Sail

Abstract

To propel a spacecraft in the direction leaving the Sun, a magnetic sail (MagSail) blocks the hypersonic solar wind plasma flow by an artificial magnetic field. In order to simulate the interaction between the solar wind and the artificially deployed magnetic field produced around a magnetic sail spacecraft, a laboratory simulator was designed and constructed inside a space chamber. As a solar wind simulator, a high-power magnetoplasmadynamic arcjet is operated in a quasisteady mode of 0.8 ms duration. It can generate a simulated solar wind that is a high-speed (above 20 km/s), high-density (1018 m−3) hydrogen plasma plume of ∼0.7 m in diameter. A small coil (2 cm in diameter), which is to simulate a magnetic sail spacecraft and can obtain 1.9-T magnetic field strength at its center, was immersed inside the simulated solar wind. Using these devices, the formation of a magnetic cavity (∼8 cm in radius) was observed around the coil, which indicates successful simulation of the plasma flow of a MagSail in the laboratory.