Harvesting Electromagnetic Energy from Hypervelocity Impacts for Solar System Exploration

CubeSats have opened new opportunities for solar system exploration by decreasing mission development and launch costs. While they have proven successful in the inner solar system, providing sustained power to these spacecraft at large distances from the sun requires novel power generation methods. Solar power is dramatically diminished at these distances and radioisotope thermoelectric generators do not scale well to spacecraft with small dimensions. The space environment could provide a solution; by harnessing energetic hazards in the environments under investigation, the spacecraft could forgo traditional power sources. Radio frequency emissions are abundant in the space environment with sources originating from planetary aurora, particle dynamics in the magnetosphere, and electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) associated with hypervelocity impacts between micrometeoroids and spacecraft. A case study of a mission to the rings of Saturn is presented and analyzed for feasibility. Upper bounds on the power emitted by the hypervelocity impact EMPs are produced by combining results from ground-based experiments and Saturnian environment models. We find that although the kinetic energy of hypervelocity impacts is significant, the conversion efficiency to EMPs is too low for spacecraft to effectively use.