English

Spacecraft floating potential measurements for the $\mathit{Wind}$ spacecraft

Space Physics 2023-09-22 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Plasma Physics

Abstract

Analysis of 8,804,545 electron velocity distribution functions (VDFs), observed by the Wind\mathit{Wind} spacecraft near 1 AU between January 1, 2005 and January 1, 2022, was performed to determine the spacecraft floating potential, ϕsc\phi{\scriptstyle_{sc}}. Wind\mathit{Wind} was designed to be electrostatically clean, which helps keep the magnitude of ϕsc\phi{\scriptstyle_{sc}} small (i.e., \sim5--9 eV for nearly all intervals) and the potential distribution more uniform. We observed spectral enhancements of ϕsc\phi{\scriptstyle_{sc}} at frequencies corresponding to the inverse synodic Carrington rotation period with at least three harmonics. The 2D histogram of ϕsc\phi{\scriptstyle_{sc}} versus time also shows at least two strong peaks with a potential third, much weaker peak. These peaks vary in time with the intensity correlated with solar maximum. Thus, the spectral peaks and histogram peaks are likely due to macroscopic phenomena like coronal mass ejections (solar cycle dependence) and stream interaction regions (Carrington rotation dependence). The values of ϕsc\phi{\scriptstyle_{sc}} are summarized herein and the resulting dataset is discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.11626,
  title  = {Spacecraft floating potential measurements for the $\mathit{Wind}$ spacecraft},
  author = {L. B. Wilson and C. S. Salem and J. W. Bonnell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.11626},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

14 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables, submitted to ApJS

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:27:41.649Z