On the UPMSat-2 Attitude Determination and Control Subsystem’s magnetometers integration

Abstract In the present work, a method for magnetometer calibration through least squares fitting is presented. This method has been applied over the magnetometer’s data set obtained during the integration tests of the Attitude Determination and Control Subsystem (ADCS) of UPMSat-2. The UPMSat-2 mission is a 50-kg satellite designed and manufactured by the Technical University of Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), and finally launched in September 2020. The satellite has three fluxgate magnetometers (one of them experimental) whose calibration is critical to obtain correct measurements to be used by the ADCS. Among several mathematical methods suitable to obtain the calibration parameters, an ordinary least squares fitting algorithm is selected as a first step of the calibration process. The surface estimated is an ellipsoid, surface represented by the magnetometer’s measures of the Earth magnetic field in a point of the space. The calibration elements of the magnetometers are related to the coefficients of the estimated ellipsoid.