Dynamics of the proposed space elevator under the influence of magnetospheric electric and magnetic fields
- Paper number
IAC-06-D4.2.08
- Author
Dr. Anders M. Jorgensen, Los Alamos National Laboratory, United States
- Coauthor
Mr. David Lang, United States
- Coauthor
Dr. Steven Patamia, Los Alamos National Laboratory, United States
- Year
2006
- Abstract
\noindent The proposed space elevator will stretch through a significant fraction of the Earth's magnetosphere, and occasionally beyond the magnetosphere into the solar wind. Because we expect that the carbon nanotube material from which the space elevator will ultimately be constructed to be highly conducting, we can expect an interaction between the magnetospheric fields and the space elevator. There are several different possible types of interactions. The most important interaction is that in which the magnetospheric electric field drives a current through the cable, which interacts with the magnetospheric magnetic field to move the cable. At the 2nd space elevator conference (Jorgensen, 2003) we presented initial calculations which suggested that this force is large enough to move the cable by many 10's and in extreme cases 100's of km in a matter of a few hours. This is a serious concern because our ability to accurately predict these fields is still limited, and effective debris and satellite avoidance maneuvers rely on accurate knowledge and prediction of the dynamical state of the space elevator cable. In a subsequent paper (Patamia, 2004) we used a free-boundary analytical model combined with a simple model of a large magnetic storm. That work demonstrated the important role of the penetration depth of the solar wind electric field, a parameter which was not tightly controlled in the simple storm model. In this work we intend to use a more realistic model of the magnetospheric fields in combination with the numerical tether simulation package GTOSS (Lang), to further elucidate the dynamics of the space elevator, and in particular the influence of local-time asymmetries in the magnetospheric fields.
- Abstract document