Characterization of a Geostationary Satellite Thruster Plumes Using Response Surface Generation

Satellites make use of thrusters related to their missions, station keeping maneuvers and end-of-life transfers. One of the secondary effects of thruster firings are the disturbing forces and torques caused by the interactions between the plume and satellite. A comprehensive numerical effort is conducted to predict disturbing forces and torques due to thruster plume and give input to mission related performance such as the amount needed for the lifetime of the satellite. A numerical approach which is based on Direct Simulation Monte Carlo method is used to model the plume of thrusters making use of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and Message Passing Interface (MPI). The individual simulations are able to predict the disturbing forces and torques given the position, orientation and exit profiles of thrusters on a geostationary satellite geometry. The other major focus of the study is to efficiently sweep the design parameter space, create response surface functions (RSF) that are orders of magnitude faster than actual high fidelity simulations and feed these RSFs into orbit propagation tools.