The Design And Development Of The Ionospheric Plasma Investigation Suite

The ionospheric plasma investigation suite, which includes the retarding potential analyzer (RPA), the ion drift meter (IDM) and the ion capture meter (ICM), has been used extensively over the past half century to provide in situ diagnostics of ion density, ion temperature, ion composition and ion drift velocity in the ionosphere. In this thesis, we designed and developed a plasma investigation suite for a Chinese seismic satellite program to measure the flow of thermal ions in the ionosphere.First, we described the earth ionosphere and its relationship with earthquakes. And then, we introduced the history, trends and principles of the ionospheric plasma investigation suite. Our main work includes the design, simulation and test of the instrument. In Chapter 5, we represented our design of the ionospheric plasma investigation suite based on the the orbit and mission objective of the Chinese seismic satellite program, and optimized the design by simulation methods. In Chapter 6, using a simulation software we evaluated the influence of the SC potential, which is caused by the plasma-satellite interaction and the electron precipitation in the high-latitude polar ionosphere. The influence of the high-energy particle current was also discussed.Main innovations of this thesis are in Chapter 7 and 8. The energy of ionospheric ions is so low that there is no plasma injection to calibrate the instrument during prelaunch. Thus the simulation becomes a very important method to investigate the performance of the sensor. In Chapter 7, we used an ion optics simulation program to build three dimensional models based on the exact size of our real sensors including the grids, the systematic errors caused by those non-ideal factors were investigated. The simulation of RPA is an expanding of other people's work. The simulation of IDM is the first time of this kind of simulation in the world. In Chapter 8, the preamplifiers of the instrument were calibrated, and the sensors were tested. Further more, we presented a voltage-multiplying method which made it possible to calibrate the sensors of the ionospheric plasma investigation suite.According to the instrument design, the simulation results and the testing results, we believe that our instrument will have a good performance in measuring the ionospheric plasma.