Propulsive Force in an Electric Solar Sail

摘要

System. An e-sail consists of an array of bare conductive tethers at very high positiveegative bias, capable of extracting solar-wind momentum by Coulomb deflection of protons. The present work focuses on the positivebias case with a potential profile that must be correctly modeled. Ion scattering does occur at some point of the profile and the resulting thrust is determined; that thrust scales slower with distance to the Sun, than it was previously suggested in the literature.