Spacecraft plasma environment and contamination simulation code: Description and first tests

A new code devoted to spacecraft local induced environment simulation is presented;Its general frame, spacecraft geometry and mesh, and plasma module are described. The three-dimensional mesh, although of a structured rectangular type, allows a good representation of spacecraft surface positions and orientations due to the automatic generation of partial cubes by an object description language. The particle-in-cell plasma module can simulate time evolution and was stable for cell-size-to-Debye-length ratios as large as 60. The main contributions of this study are four test simulations. The first three, Child-Langmuir law and two Langmuir probes, are borrowed from plasma physics, and their solutions are known, either analytically or numerically. They constitute extensive testing of the plasma code over a wide range of Debye lengths. The last simulation, a typical low-Earth-orbit environment, was more complex, and only partial validation was achieved.