Performance Evaluation of Magnetoplasma Sail

磁等离子体帆（MPS）是一种先进的空间推进概念，通过在航天器周围人工产生的磁层接收太阳风动量来加速航天器离开太阳的方向。该概念依赖于磁层膨胀过程，其中从航天器人工发射的等离子体用于增加磁层尺寸，但该过程是否有效增加MPS的推力水平是一个有争议的问题。本文通过数值模拟和缩比实验验证了MPS的有效性

Magnetoplasma sail (MPS) is an advanced in-space propulsion concept to accelerate a spacecraft in the direction leaving the sun by receiving the solar wind momentum with an artificially produced magnetosphere around a spacecraft. The concept relies on magnetosphere inflation process, in which artificially emitted plasma from a spacecraft is used to increase the magnetospheric size, but whether the process is effective to increase MPS's thrust level or not was a controversial issue. This study demonstrated the validity of MPS, showing thrust enhancement by numerical simulations as well as scale-model experiment in a vacuum chamber