The electric field in the vicinity of a photo-emitting plate in a plasmaKnowledge of the electric field in the vicinity of a spacecraft provides necessary corrections to measurements of ambient fields and charged particle fluxes and a required parameter to understand the motion of dust particles and grains around the spacecraft. The complex problem of the entire electric field, needed for grain transport calculations, is treated for the one-dimensional case. By approximations to the analysis of a photo-emitting plate immersed in a dilute plasma, explicit expressions for the potential and the electric field were derived. The two classes of implicit solutions for the potential reported by them are shown to yield essentially identical results for the conditions in our solar system. The values were obtained following assumptions of a later paper by Guernsey and Fu, in which the emitted photoelectron distribution is taken as Maxwellian. These results are compared with a simple model due to Grand and Tunaley, wherein the effect of the dilute plasma is neglected entirely.
Document ID
19730024106
Acquisition Source
Legacy CDMS
Document Type
Other
Authors
Barengoltz, J. (Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Bauerle, C. (Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)