The nanosatellite Munin, a simple tool for auroral research Original Research Article

The scientific objective of the nanosatellite Munin is to collect data of the auroral activity over both the northern and southern poles. The satellite has been developed by Swedish Institute of Space Physics under international cooperation. The purpose of the Munin project is both to achieve the scientific objectives and to show that it is possible to achieve such objectives by a very small satellite. A passive magnetic attitude control system is used to stabilize Munin along the direction of an intensity vector of the local geomagnetic field. The paper presents the development of the attitude control system and gives a brief discription of the tools and algorithms used for the attitude determination.