The Study of Spacecraft Surface Charging Effect Based on Equivalent Circuit Model

Spacecraft charging to the magnitude of kV may be harmful to the health of onboard electronics. New equivalent circuit model is adopted in the surface charging analysis in this paper. Voltage controlled current source (VCCS) is used to simulate the injected current of hot plasma instead of the popular used constant current source. The equivalent circuit model was built to calculate the charging potential of each node. The model is performed under two conditions, one is spacecraft in shadow and the other is in sunlight. At the same time, in order to verify the rationality and accuracy of the equivalent circuit model, taking the satellite in the shadow area as an example, the charging equivalent circuit of the solar cell array in the plasma environment is established, and the potential values of the structure and the solar cell array are obtained.