In-Flight Calibration Processes for the MMS Fluxgate Magnetometers

The calibration effort for the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) Analog Fluxgate (AFG) and DigitalFluxgate (DFG) magnetometers is a coordinated effort between three primary institutions: University of California, LosAngeles (UCLA); Space Research Institute, Graz, Austria (IWF); and Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Since thesuccessful deployment of all 8 magnetometers on 17 March 2015, the effort to confirm and update the groundcalibrations has been underway during the MMS commissioning phase. The in-flight calibration processes evaluatetwelve parameters that determine the alignment, orthogonalization, offsets, and gains for all 8 magnetometers usingalgorithms originally developed by UCLA and the Technical University of Braunschweig and tailored to MMS by IWF,UCLA, and GSFC. We focus on the processes run at GSFC to determine the eight parameters associated with spin tonesand harmonics. We will also discuss the processing flow and interchange of parameters between GSFC, IWF, and UCLA.IWF determines the low range spin axis offsets using the Electron Drift Instrument (EDI). UCLA determines the absolutegains and sensor azimuth orientation using Earth field comparisons. We evaluate the performance achieved for MMS andgive examples of the quality of the resulting calibrations.