Physics
Scientific paper
Dec 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006agufmsm14a..05s&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2006, abstract #SM14A-05
Physics
1541 Satellite Magnetics: Main Field, Crustal Field, External Field, 2721 Field-Aligned Currents And Current Systems (2409)
Scientific paper
Space Technology 5 (ST-5) returned high quality multi-point measurements of the near-Earth magnetic field throughout its three month long mission. The three ST-5 micro-satellites were launched into a 300 x 4500 km, dawn dusk, sun synchronous orbit (inclination = 105.6 deg) orbit with a period of 138 min by a Pegasus launch vehicle on March 22, 2006. The spacecraft were maintained in a "pearls on a sting" constellation with controlled spacings ranging from just over 5000 km down to under 50 km. The individual micro-satellites were 48 cm tall octagons with diameters of 50 cm. They were spin-stabilized at approximately 20 rpm at deployment and slowly spun-down to about 15 rpm by the end of the mission. Each spacecraft carried a miniature tri-axial fluxgate magnetometer (MAG) provided by the University of California at Los Angeles (Instrument Scientist R. Strangeway) mounted at the end of a ultra-low mass 72 cm boom. The MAG had two dynamic ranges: 0 - ±64,000 nT (Full-field) and 0 - ±16,000 nT (Low-field) with digital resolutions of 1.3 nT (Full-field) and 0.3 nT (Low-field), respectively. The MAG sample rate was 16 vectors/s. Pre-launch measurements in the GSFC Magnetic Coil Facility showed that the magnetic cleanliness program was very successful with the predicted spacecraft field at the MAG sensors for all three micro-satellites being < 1 nT. Initial analyses of the ST-5 MAG measurements indicate that measurement accuracies of +/- 0.1 deg in direction and +/- 0.1% in field strength were achieved. Using the ST-5 magnetic field measurements we present the first observations of field-aligned current (FAC) temporal variability on time scales less than 10 min, the first direct measurements of FAC motion and thickness, the first multi-point measurements of wave-like cusp field-aligned current filaments and the first geomagnetic crustal anomaly measurements by a multi- spacecraft constellation.
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