Scaling laws for a High Efficiency Multistage Plasma Thruster

Kurzfassung

Upcoming formation flying space missions have unprecedented requirements in both low thrust and low noise-to-thrust ratio for attitude control. With the recent discovery of gravitational waves, LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) is an outstanding example for such a mission. Its requirements are thrust no more than 100 µN and root of the noise spectral density ≤ 0.1 µN/√Hz. One attempt to reach this regime is to develop a downscaled version of the High Efficiency Multistage Plasma Thruster (HEMPT). One part of this activity is to support the development by computer modeling. In order to simulate the thruster plasma, the Particle-in-Cell (PiC) method is used. We will present analytical considerations and models using the PiC method for a downscaled and an unscaled HEMPT which has been performed in order to investigate the scaling laws of this kind of plasma thruster.