Electrostatic Analysis of an Artificial Orbiting Satellite for Absolute Charging

This paper presents the evaluation of a capacitance matrix and the temporal body potential of an artificial orbiting satellite considering a metallic cuboid, parabolic reflector antennas, and solar panels. Integral equations are formed by relating the unknown charge density on the metallic conductor and are solved using the method of moments, in which the pulse functions are used as basis functions and the delta functions are used as testing functions. The surfaces of the conducting structure are meshed using nonuniform triangular subareas. The matrix equations are solved using an iterative generalized minimum residual algorithm. The numerical data on the capacitance matrix and the charge distribution of these structures have been presented. The validity of this analysis has been established by comparing the data on capacitance available in the literature for the metallic cuboid with the data on capacitance computed by the present method for similar structures. The temporal behavior of body potential of the satellite is computed for different cases.