The Ulysses Magnetic Coil Facility at ESTEC (annotated)
Date: 05 November 2009
Satellite: LISA Pathfinder
Depicts: The Ulysses Magnetic Coil Facility
Location: European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC, the Netherlands
Copyright: ESA
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.
Last Update: 1 September 2019