Session
Advanced Technologies Research & Academia 1
Location
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Abstract
Dense CubeSat constellations equipped with science-grade AC magnetometers offer a transformative path toward high spatial and temporal resolution of several magnetospheric phenomena that large spacecraft missions cannot resolve. Realizing this vision demands boomless magnetometry– due to deployment risks and resource constraints on nano/micro satellite platforms in large scale –capable of operating in the presence of intense spacecraft-generated electromagnetic interference without the spatial separation that conventional booms provide. This paper advances the characterization of the Wavelet-Adaptive Interference Cancellation for Underdetermined Platforms (WAIC-UP) algorithm across different frequency regimes and two distinct classes of test data. In the 50 Hz to 30 kHz regime, Monte Carlo simulations using synthetic CubeSat interference model establish that tuning the Morlet wavelet temporal width parameter to fb = 4 s2 recovers median Pearson correlations of ∼0.99 between the recovered and true ambient waveforms– a dramatic improvement over the ∼0.67 baseline of the default parameterization –while identifying a time-resolution boundary above fb = 9 s2 beyond which sparsity assumptions degrade and performance falls below the baseline. In the 10 Hz to 2 kHz regime, WAIC-UP is evaluated for the first time against authentic spacecraft electromagnetic noise, using stray magnetic field measurements from a powered TBEx CubeSat Engineering Development Unit paired with in situ AC waveform data recorded by NASA’s Polar spacecraft Plasma Wave Instrument during geomagnetically active conditions around January, 1997. Across four stray-ambient dataset combinations spanning impulsive and diffuse auroral field morphologies, and including chirped wheel speeds, torquer PWM harmonics and transient dual-source spectral overlap, WAIC-UP achieves correlations exceeding 0.99 in the best-performing cases with SNR above 16 dB, while systematic degradation under near-symmetric sensor geometry and spectrally diffuse ambient conditions reveals potential failure modes directly attributable to the algorithm’s gain estimation assumptions. These results constitute the first real-hardware validation of WAIC-UP in the ELF-to-ULF band, representing a meaningful Technology Readiness Level advance, and establish a roadmap for further characterization, third-sensor augmentation, and integration of housekeeping-telemetry-informed adaptive parameterization toward on-orbit boomless AC magnetometry from CubeSat constellation platforms.
Document Type
Event
Advancing Wavelet-Adaptive Interference Cancellation to Enable CubeSat Constellations for High-Fidelity AC Magnetometry
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Dense CubeSat constellations equipped with science-grade AC magnetometers offer a transformative path toward high spatial and temporal resolution of several magnetospheric phenomena that large spacecraft missions cannot resolve. Realizing this vision demands boomless magnetometry– due to deployment risks and resource constraints on nano/micro satellite platforms in large scale –capable of operating in the presence of intense spacecraft-generated electromagnetic interference without the spatial separation that conventional booms provide. This paper advances the characterization of the Wavelet-Adaptive Interference Cancellation for Underdetermined Platforms (WAIC-UP) algorithm across different frequency regimes and two distinct classes of test data. In the 50 Hz to 30 kHz regime, Monte Carlo simulations using synthetic CubeSat interference model establish that tuning the Morlet wavelet temporal width parameter to fb = 4 s2 recovers median Pearson correlations of ∼0.99 between the recovered and true ambient waveforms– a dramatic improvement over the ∼0.67 baseline of the default parameterization –while identifying a time-resolution boundary above fb = 9 s2 beyond which sparsity assumptions degrade and performance falls below the baseline. In the 10 Hz to 2 kHz regime, WAIC-UP is evaluated for the first time against authentic spacecraft electromagnetic noise, using stray magnetic field measurements from a powered TBEx CubeSat Engineering Development Unit paired with in situ AC waveform data recorded by NASA’s Polar spacecraft Plasma Wave Instrument during geomagnetically active conditions around January, 1997. Across four stray-ambient dataset combinations spanning impulsive and diffuse auroral field morphologies, and including chirped wheel speeds, torquer PWM harmonics and transient dual-source spectral overlap, WAIC-UP achieves correlations exceeding 0.99 in the best-performing cases with SNR above 16 dB, while systematic degradation under near-symmetric sensor geometry and spectrally diffuse ambient conditions reveals potential failure modes directly attributable to the algorithm’s gain estimation assumptions. These results constitute the first real-hardware validation of WAIC-UP in the ELF-to-ULF band, representing a meaningful Technology Readiness Level advance, and establish a roadmap for further characterization, third-sensor augmentation, and integration of housekeeping-telemetry-informed adaptive parameterization toward on-orbit boomless AC magnetometry from CubeSat constellation platforms.
