Removing strong solar array disturbances and telemetry errors from dc magnetic field measurements with a dual fluxgate technique

Due to a wrong wiring of the solar panels on a Double Star spacecraft, very large magnetic interferences (20-30 nT) occurred in the magnetic field vector measurements. Furthermore, the shunting system of the spacecraft solar power system caused sudden changes in the level of interferences. Finally the observations suffered from frequent telemetry errors causing random spikes in the data. With help of dual fluxgate measurements and signal processing technique, the data have been cleaned first from the spikes and then from the solar array disturbances to an accuracy of better than 0.5 nT for most of the time. This paper presents the basic steps of the cleaning procedures.