Rendering of a NanoMagSat satellite. Photo: ESA

Open Cosmos won a 35 million euro ($37 million) contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to build three satellites to monitor Earth’s magnetic field in the NanoMagSat mission. The first satellite is expected to launch by late 2027 with the second and third to follow. 

Open Cosmos will serve as the prime contractor and satellite manufacturer. CEA-Léti in France will contribute the payload development and magnetometer manufacturer and Comet Aerospace in Spain will deliver the deployable boom and optical bench. NanoMagSat is part of ESA’s Scout framework, a small satellite component of the ESA Earth Observation FutureEO program.

The three satellites will orbit the Earth at a 545 km altitude, with two satellites positioned at a 60 degree inclination and one in a prograde polar orbit. Each satellite will carry a miniaturized absolute magnetometer at the end of a boom and a high-frequency magnetometer half-way along the boom for magnetic measurements, a Langmuir probe to measure electron temperature and density, and two GNSS receivers.

Data captured by the satellites will applicable for assessing space weather, improving navigation and directional drilling precision, and observing planetary magnetic changes and ionospheric plasma dynamics.

“NanoMagSat is a great example of the complementarity of small missions to larger ones,” commented Florian Deconinck, Open Cosmos vice president of growth. “A small satellite size makes it ideal to minimize electromagnetic noise, and be deployed in constellations for better spatio-temporal coverage, all within the efficient Scout programmatic constraint. A first step towards an international space network for long term monitoring of the Earth magnetic field.”