Future Directions for Magnetic Sensors for Space Applications

Magnetic field sensors and their front-end electronics designed for space must keep a reasonable balance between resource requirements (volume, mass and power) and performance with the latter being very much driven by the application. Sensors based on fluxgate principle, proton precession and optical pumping have been widely used in the past. But a new generation of magnetic field sensing instruments, partly based on very large scale integration (VLSI) techniques and being available commercially-off-the-shelf, tend to take over some of the current applications. This paper compares classical with new measuring principles dedicated for space and discusses future directions.