Fore-Wake Excitations from Orbiting Space Debris: Signature and Significance for Space Situational Awareness
Abstract
The primary focus of this study has been on the investigation of nonlinear wave excitations from a charged body moving at a high speed in a plasma. The motivation has been to model the excitations that can occur in the ionosphere due the passage of charged debris objects and explore the feasibility of exploiting them for Space Situational Awareness (SSA) purposes. The excitations, that can be either electrostatic or electromagnetic in nature, can arise because the debris objects constitute a perturbing charge source as well as a perturbing current source. The nonlinear saturated state of such perturbations can take the form of solitons. Multiple soliton emissions can then create a cloud of plasma irregularity that can be easier to detect from earth and act as a tracking aid for the debris. To this end we have carried out a series of theoretical and experimental investigations to characterize the nature of these excitations and assess their dependence on various properties of the charged object. A novel feature of the study has been the exploration of electromagnetic solitons using both fluid and particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. Our PIC simulations, in particular, have provided the first theoretical evidence of electromagnetic precursors in the form of magneto-sonic solitons. Electromagnetic excitations offer several potential advantages over electrostatic structures for SSA studies. They can be much longer lived than electrostatic waves as the latter can suffer strong Landau damping under the ionospheric conditions of the LEO region. The electromagnetic solitons also have a larger spatial extent that can contribute towards a wider dimension of the irregularity cloud. While electrostatic fore-wakes consisting of nearly one dimensional (planar) solitons have been experimentally observed, our present theoretical results can stimulate similar experimental investigations towards detecting electromagnetic solitons in a laboratory setting.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 12, 2022
- Accession Number
- AD1175451
Entities
People
- Abhijit Sen
Organizations
- Institute for Plasma Research