The plasma brake is a thin negatively biased tether which has been proposed as an efficient concept for deorbiting satellites and debris objects from low Earth orbit .
We simulate the interaction with the ionospheric plasma ram flow with the plasma brake tether by a high performance electrostatic particle in cell code to evaluate the thrust .
The tether is assumed to be perpendicular to the flow .
We perform runs for different tether voltage , magnetic field orientation and plasma ion mass .
We show that a simple analytical thrust formula reproduces most of the simulation results well .
The interaction with the tether and the plasma flow is laminar ( i.e. , smooth and not turbulent ) when the magnetic field is perpendicular to the tether and the flow .
If the magnetic field is parallel to the tether , the behaviour is unstable and thrust is reduced by a modest factor .
The case when the magnetic field is aligned with the flow can also be unstable , but does not result in notable thrust reduction .
We also fix an error in an earlier reference .
According to the simulations , the predicted thrust of the plasma brake is large enough to make the method promising for low Earth orbit ( LEO ) satellite deorbiting .
As a numerical example we estimate that a 5 km long plasma brake tether weighing 0.055 kg could produce 0.43 mN breaking force which is enough to reduce the orbital altitude of a 260 kg object mass by 100 km during one year .