Numerical Studies of Dust Distribution around Small Asteroids

Abstract:

While the dynamics of dust transport around an airless body has been a focused area of research in recent years, various challenging aspects still remain to be addressed. This paper presents an investigation of charged dust transport and distribution around small asteroids utilizing two newly developed numerical models and laboratory measurements of dust layer charging in a simulated asteroid plasma environment.

The first model is a full particle Particle-in-Cell (PIC) model to simulate plasma flow around an asteroid and calculate surface charging self-consistently from charge deposition on asteroid. A major feature of this model is that the asteroid surface is treated as an “interface” between two mediums rather than a boundary, and the simulation domain includes not only the plasma but also the entire asteroid. An immersed-finite-element field solver is applied which calculates both the surface floating potential and the electric field inside the asteroid directly from local charge deposition. The material properties of asteroid are also explicitly included in the simulation. Results from PIC simulations of asteroid-plasma interactions, along with laboratory measurements of dust charge-to-mass ratio under a simulated asteroid surface charging environment, are fed into a dust dynamics model to simulate charged dust levitation, transport and distribution. In addition to electrostatic and gravitational forces, the dynamics of dust surface impacts and asteroid body rotation are also included in the model. We discuss the effects of asteroid composition and space plasma environments on dust levitation and transport. We present simulation results of dust distribution around several different types of small asteroids.