Laboratory Facility for Simulating Magnetoplasma Sail

Abstract

Magnetoplasma sail (MPS) is a deep space propulsion system, in which an artificial magnetic cavity captures the energy of the solar wind to propel a spacecraft in the direction leaving the sun. This paper describes an improved facility for the scale-model experiment of MPS. We employed a magnetoplasmadynamic arcjet as a solar wind simulator. It is observed that a plasma flow from the solar wind simulator reaches a quasi-steady state of about 0.8 ms duration after a transient phase while initiating a discharge. During this initial phase of the discharge, a blast-wave was observed to develop in a vacuum chamber. Then, a quasi-steady interaction continues when a solenoidal coil (MPS scale model) is immersed into a 45-km/s-velocity and 10-m-number-density plasma flow. As a result of the interaction between the plasma flow and the MPS scale model, a bow shock and a magnetic cavity were formed in front of the coil. Thrust measurement was conducted for only a few limited cases, but the momentum of the simulated solar wind is found to decrease, and as a result, it is found that the solar wind momentum is transferred to the solenoidal coil simulating MPS consisting of only a solenoidal coil.