Magsatspacecraft was launched in the fall of 1979 and ended in the spring of 1980. The mission was to map the Earth's magnetic field, the satellite had two magnetometers. The scalar and vector magnetometers gave Magsat a capability beyond that of any previous spacecraft. Extended by a telescoping boom, the magnetometers were distanced from the magnetic field created by the satellite and its electronics. The satellite carried two magnetometers, a three-axis fluxgate magnetometer for determining the strength and direction of magnetic fields, and an ion-vapor/vector magnetometer for determining the magnetic field caused by the vector magnetometer itself. MAGSAT is considered to be one of the more important Science/Earth orbiting satellites launched; the data it accumulated is still being used, particularly in linking new satellite data to past observations. After launch the payload was brought to an orbit of 96.8° facing the Sun as the Earth rotated underneath. It was kept in a close Earth orbit, with vector magnetometers capable of sensing magnetic fields closer to Earth's surface. The data collected by this satellite allowed a 3D-mapping of the Earth's magnetic interior as never seen before. In combination with a later satellite, Ørsted, it has been an essential component for explaining the current declining state of the Earth's magnetic field.
History
On October 30, 1979 Magsat was launched from pad SLC-5 at Vandenberg AFB in California on a Scout II rocket bearing 97° in a dusk to dawn orbit. The spacecraft was placed in an orbit with a perigee of and an apogee of. After reaching orbit, its telescoping boom was extended outward by. Two star cameras were used to define the position of the spacecraft relative to Earth. The orbit allowed the satellite to map a majority of the Earth's surfaces except the geographic poles. The satellite decayed from orbit on June 11, 1980.
According to a Johns Hopkins University / Applied Physics Laboratory report, and archival NASA source documentation, the MAGSAT spacecraft utilized two RCA 1802 microprocessors running at a 2 MHz clock speed in a redundant setup. A stored memory of 2.8 kilobytes in PROMs with 1 K bytes of random access memory provided the program and working space for the microprocessor. Other integrated circuits chips of the CDP 1800 family of circuits were also used, including the CDP 1852 interface circuit and the CDP 1822 1K x 1 RAM, as well as Harris CMOS 6611A PROMS. Three families of circuits were considered for the computer system design: two NMOS families and the RCA CDP1802 CMOS microprocessor. The 1802 was chosen based on various criteria, including the 1802 CMOS technology being power efficient by two orders of magnitude compared to the NMOS microprocessors, compatibility with the existing power supply of the satellite and the low-power requirements of CMOS, the radiation hardening of the 1802 and lack thereof in the 6800 and 8080, and other 1802-based functioning and features. Software for the project was developed with an in-house APL-generated 1802 cross-assembler running on IBM 360/370 mainframe computers.
Critique
Magsat was not without problems. One of the biggest is that the motion of a metallic object tends to create a magnetic field. One study after the mission found a nonlinear fluxgate response when exposed to fields greater than 5000 mT. The applied field had to be transverse to the axis of the magnetometer. The design was improved by creating a feedback relay over a spherical design. This was the design used on later spacecraft . This configuration magnetometer was also later used on the Magnetometer of the Jupiter orbiter Juno, which arrived at the planet Jupiter in the 2010s.
