Abstract
This paper describes and discusses the preprocessing and calibration of the magnetic data taken by the navigational magnetometers onboard the two GRACE satellites, with focus on the almost 10 years period from January 2008 to the end of the GRACE mission in October 2017 for which 1-Hz magnetic data are available. A calibration of the magnetic data is performed by comparing the raw magnetometer sensor readings with model magnetic vector values as provided by the CHAOS-7 geomagnetic field model for the time and position of the GRACE data. The presented approach also accounts for magnetic disturbances produced by the satellite’s magnetorquer and for temperature effects, which are parametrized by the Sun incident angle. The root-mean-squared error of the difference between the calibrated data and CHAOS-7 model values is about 10 nT, which makes the GRACE magnetometer data relevant for geophysical investigations.
Highlights
Most satellites are equipped with magnetometers as part of their attitude control system
Looking at statistics separately for dayside and nightside data reveals consistently lower rms data misfit during night. The cause for this could be contributions from unmodelled geophysical sources, larger magnetic disturbances when the spacecraft is illuminated by the Sun, and/or magnetometer temperature effects that are not properly described by the Sun incident angles α, β
Summary and outlook We have described and discussed the preprocessing and calibration steps applied to the magnetic data measured by the platform magnetometers onboard the two GRACE satellites
Summary
Most satellites are equipped with magnetometers as part of their attitude control system. Alken et al (2020) and Kloss et al (2021) describe such an approach, and Kloss et al (2021) applied it to GRACE magnetic data after correcting for spacecraft disturbance fields and magnetometer non-linearities using (a preliminary version of ) the “common” calibration parameters determined in the present paper.
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