The Air Force has recently built a vacuum chamber for simulating LEO and GEO space environments for testing small satellites or satellite subsystems. Four natural environmental sources are provided: broadband solar flux, and narrowband electron, proton, and atomic oxygen fluxes; together with spacecraft charging; outgassing and attitude control Xe ion simulators. Although the chamber has diagnostic sensors to measure the fluxes from the sources at one plane, uncertainties remain about the details of the source emissions, their interactions, and impacts on the chamber. To help address these uncertainties models of the sources are being developed. We have modeled the Atomic Oxygen source and present results of our recent computer simulations. We motivate our choice of the dynamical DSMC code used, and present results such as the AO fluence time history and its spatial distribution over the test article; chamber pressure time history; flow velocity contours; the importance of particle-particle collisions; and attempts to model the motion of residual source-produced O+ ions in the geomagnetic field. We compare with existing measurements.
Simulation of a pulsed atomic oxygen beam
Nanophotonics and Macrophotonics for Space Environments VII ; 2013 ; San Diego,California,United States
Proc. SPIE ; 8876
2013-09-24
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
Simulation of a pulsed atomic oxygen beam (Invited Paper) [8876-25]
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