Weaken solar scintillation prediction model for EM wave propagation in deep space

Electromagnetic (EM) waves propagating through the solar corona irregularities suffer solar scintillation during superior solar conjunction. Considering the geometric of the communication model, the corona structure and the turbulence spectral model, a prediction model for both amplitude fluctuations, phase fluctuations and angle-of-arrival fluctuations is proposed with the weaken scintillation theory. The simulation results demonstrate that the solar corona parameters, such as the spectral index and the turbulence outer scale have a tremendous impact on the fluctuations. Besides, solar scintillation increases with the decreasing of the heliocentric distance and its impact can be reduced by enhancing the EM waves frequency. Furthermore, the proposed model shows great agreement with the observed data and its accuracy increases when the radio frequency gets larger. Therefore, our solar scintillation prediction model can be effectively applied in the future deep space exploration.