ESA Science & Technology - The Ulysses Magnetic Coil Facility at ESTEC (annotated)

The Ulysses Magnetic Coil facility is one of 5 small magnetic measurement systems deployed in Europe and is used to test and characterise equipment units before integration on spacecraft requiring magnetic cleanliness.

The MCFs allow:

• compensation of the Earth's magnetic field, using two pairs of Helmholtz coils
• demagnetisation (also known as deperming) of equipment units
• testing the susceptibility of equipment units to magnetisation (also know as perming)
• automatic acquisition of the magnetic field from equipment units while rotating them through 360° and computation of equivalent Multiple Dipole Models of them (by solving the associated inverse problem through non-linear optimisation)

For further details see the article "Magnetic Coil Facility" linked on the right-hand menu.