Novel magnetic cleaning techniques for Solar Orbiter magnetometer

Solar Orbiter is an ESA mission studying the heliosphere and the Sun. The magnetometer is designed to measure the magnetic field local to the spacecraft and is composed of two sensors located on a boom at different displacement from the spacecraft. This configuration reduces the electromagnetic interference caused by other on-board electrical systems and allows the exploitation of the “gradiometer technique” to separate spacecraft generated signals from the solar magnetic field. This paper describes the analysis of the magnetometer data to develop a completely novel procedure for removing the magnetic field generated by the spacecraft-controlled heaters, the instruments, and the thrusters on the spacecraft. The difference between the data measured by the two sensors is used to identify this signal, which is then appropriately scaled and removed from the data. This approach produces cleaned magnetic field data which is routinely uploaded to the Solar Orbiter Archive for science exploitation.