A New Onboard Calibration Strategy for Three-Axis Magnetometers in Low Earth Orbit Satellites

Na  Liu; Jin  Zhao; Yuxiu  Guo

doi:10.6180/jase.202504_28(4).0015

A New Onboard Calibration Strategy for Three-Axis Magnetometers in Low Earth Orbit Satellites

Physics

Na Liu¹, Jin Zhao², and Yuxiu Guo¹This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

¹College of Physics and Information Engineering, Cangzhou Normal University, Hebei Cangzhou 061001, China

²College of Arts&Information Engineering, Dalian Polytechnic University, Liaoning Zhuanghe 116400, China

Received: October 23, 2023
Accepted: May 21, 2024
Publication Date: June 20, 2024

Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.6180/jase.202504_28(4).0015

In this paper, a detailed model of the onboard magnetometer and a novel onboard calibration strategy are proposed for three-axis magnetometers installed on low Earth orbit satellites. The extracted model includes all error factors and well describes the behavior of a real magnetometer. Also, a new procedure is suggested to generate magnetometer data so that the data close to reality can be used to estimate its parameters. Moreover, a two-stage algorithm based on the Kalman filter is developed that, in addition to bias, scale factor, and nonorthogonality, also estimates misalignment error. More specifically, the sensor parametersbias, scale factor, and non-orthogonality-are calculated when the magnetometer data are introduced as measurement data into the algorithm’s first step. Next, a misalignment error is computed by feeding the estimated parameters into the algorithm’s second step. The suggested model and tactic are then simulated. The suggested approach has minimal convergence time and great accuracy, according to the simulation results.

Keywords: Three-axis magnetometer; onboard calibration; Kalman filter; low Earth orbit satellites

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