On determining fluxgate magnetometer spin axis offsets from mirror mode observations

Plaschke, Ferdinand; Narita, Yasuhito

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-34-759-2016

Articles | Volume 34, issue 9

https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-34-759-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-34-759-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 34, issue 9

Regular paper

|

16 Sep 2016

Regular paper |

| 16 Sep 2016

On determining fluxgate magnetometer spin axis offsets from mirror mode observations

Ferdinand Plaschke and Yasuhito Narita

Data sets

Data from the THEMIS mission, including THC level 2 FGM and ESA data University of California Berkeley http://themis.ssl.berkeley.edu/data/themis

Solar wind data from NASA's OMNI high resolution data set (1 mim cadence) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center ftp://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/data/omni

Short summary

Spacecraft-mounted magnetic field instruments (magnetometers) need to be routinely calibrated. This involves determining the magnetometer outputs in vanishing ambient magnetic fields, the so-called offsets. We introduce and test a new method to determine these offsets with high accuracy, the mirror mode method, which is complementary to existing methods. The mirror mode method should be highly beneficial to current and future magnetic field observations near Earth, other planets, and comets.