Abstract
The objective of the Swarm mission is to provide the best ever survey of the geomagnetic field and its temporal dependency, and to gain new insights into improving our knowledge of the Earth’s interior and climate. The Swarm concept consists of a constellation of three satellites in three different near polar orbits between 300 and 550 km altitude. Goal of the current study is to achieve a fast diagnosis of the Swarm system performance in orbit during commission phase and operations of the spacecraft. With the help of a specially developed software package datasets are analyzed in terms of a closed loop simulation and the effects on the reconstruction of the magnetic field resulting from various error sources acting on the spacecraft are investigated. At first, the simplest noise-free case is examined and then more complex scenarios which include attitude errors, position errors and spectral leakage are investigated. In order to not only compare the impact of different error sources, but also to investigate the effects of the different noise levels on the magnetic field reconstruction, the magnitude of the different error sources is kept variable and different numerical experiments are performed. Thus, the influence of external magnetic sources, such as the magnetospheric residual signal, or the impact of data selection on the lithospheric field retrieval can be examined as a further extension. In this study we emphasize on the reconstruction of the lithospheric field and as a first step we consider one satellite. As a second step, the study is extended to the gradient approach which uses the more realistic Swarm constellation of two flying sidebyside satellites. As a result, the lithospheric field is reconstructed with better quality by magnetic field gradient data. Monthly magnetic field retrievals are performed for each orbiting Swarm satellite. By an intercomparison of the monthly solutions a fast diagnosis of the Swarm system performance can be done.
| Original language | English |
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| Publication date | 2009 |
| Publication status | Published - 2009 |
| Event | ESA’s Second Swarm International Science Meeting - Duration: 1 Jan 2009 → … Conference number: 2 |
Conference
| Conference | ESA’s Second Swarm International Science Meeting |
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| Number | 2 |
| Period | 01/01/2009 → … |