Planetary Science and Exploration Seminar, Raymond Lau, “Formation of Electromagnetic Pulses Due to Hypervelocity Impact Plasmas on Spacecraft”

Abstract: Spacecraft face a multitude of hazards in the space environment that threaten the success of their missions. In particular, the presence of background meteoroid clouds and the growing space debris population has become a topic of interest in recent decades due to their impacts against spacecraft. As a result of their high orbital velocities, meteoroids and space debris can impact spacecraft at a speed faster than the speed of sound of the material, creating shock waves that propagate and ablate the spacecraft material. With high enough kinetic energy, the ablated material can ionize, forming a dense cloud of plasma. These plasmas can emit electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) and are a suspected cause of electrical damage onto spacecraft. In this work, we present the ongoing work in determining the physical mechanism that causes EMPs to form via computational and theoretical investigations, as well as a preliminary framework to predict the severity of the EMP due to the so-called “hypervelocity impact plasma.” Raymond Lau is a Ph.D. candidate in the Space Environment and Satellite Systems (SESS) Laboratory under the supervision of Professor Sigrid Elschot in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at Stanford University. He obtained his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Rice University in 2020, conducting research in computational microfluidics. After coming to Stanford, he has conducted research in the modeling and simulation of plasma physics in various applications. These include Hall effect thrusters, capacitively coupled plasmas, laser-plasma interactions, hypervelocity impact plasmas, and inertial confinement fusion capsules. He has previously interned at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a Design Physics Intern and will pursue a Computational Physics Internship at Pacific Fusion this summer. He has won several awards from his research activities, including the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, best Student paper/presentation at the 2023 International Union of Radio Science General Assembly, and the 2025 IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society Graduate Scholarship Award. Outside of his academic interests, Raymond has participated in various service-based activities, such as Eduexplora: a two-week summer program for high schoolers from Latin America to visit and enroll in classes.