Characteristics of plasmas formed from hypervelocity impact

Satellites are surrounded by orbital debris and meteoroids that cause mechanical or electrical damage. While mechanical damage is well studied, more than half of the electrical anomalies are undiagnosed which can be attributed to hypervelocity impact (HVI). HVI refers to a collision where the projectile speed exceeds the speed of sound in the target material and its impact energy ionizes the material near the surface, creates plasma and emits charged particles. Ground-based experiments have generated empirical power law relations which describe the impact charge produced as a function of impactor mass and speed.

The goal of this paper is to use past experiments to 1. Develop a new technique for calculating the impact charge produced and the power law for different species from the same impact conditions. 2. Use Time of Flight analysis to detect the charged particle compositions as well as their initial speeds. For the first time, the results suggest that the charge production power law is species specific and there are different formation mechanisms involved in a single HVI event, some of which are associated with positive to negative pairs that come from dissociation of a molecule. In addition, presence of species like SiO2 and SiO was detected which matches previous findings.