To date, one of the most important problems in the operation of spacecraft is the occurrence of electrostatic discharges, which are the cause of onboard radioelectronic equipment failure. Such of electrostatic discharges are caused by the electrification of the spacecraft surface as a result of prolonged exposure to ionizing cosmic radiation.
The theoretical and practical study of this problem has been the subject of many works by domestic and foreign authors.
In order to ensure reliable operation of the spacecraft of onboard radioelectronic equipment under the conditions of the periodic emergence of an electrostatic discharges, knowledge of the magnitudes of the interfering signals in the on-board cable network along the spacecraft outer surface is required. This requires a pattern machine simulation of the current spreading over the spacecraft surface based on the results of which the requirements for the noise immunity of electronic units included in the spacecraft are formed.
The linear equivalent electric circuit, consisting of a significant number of nodes and a uniformly covering spacecraft surface in the form of a grid, is often considered as the mathematical model used to study the current spreading. The tasks of analyzing such schemes are highly labor intensive and can require tens of machine time hours to solve them, which makes it difficult to carry out many tests for different of electrostatic discharges parameters and, as a result, increases the time needed to develop the onboard radioelectronic equipment. A formal method is proposed for constructing a macromodel of a linear equivalent electrical circuit formed over a communication satellite antenna. The macromodel can contain as many phase variables as the antenna designer wants. The macromodel maintains a simple dependence of its output characteristics on the design-technological variable parameters of the antenna model. The use of this approach allows reducing the complexity of calculations by several orders of magnitude.