Autonomous Reaction Wheel Magnetic Signature Detection Against Background Noise in Spacecraft

Magnetic interference from the spinning reaction wheels often used to control spacecraft orientation is a well-known issue for accurate sensing of geophysical measurements using sensitive magnetometers that capture the geophysical magnetic fields in the macroscale (order of 1 km or greater). Disentangling the reaction wheel interference from the background measurements has been an open challenge to geomagnetic signal analysis for several decades. In this letter, we address this challenge as a feature separation problem and leverage the informational redundancy and feature continuity across multiple spatial dimensions and dual sensors to calculate accurate spectral support estimates of the reaction wheel signature. Specifically, we exploit the feature continuity across multiple spectrograms to detect the multiharmonic reaction wheel signature across multiple spatial dimensions and inboard and outboard sensor measurements against the background geophysical magnetic field. A representative case study for the e-POP/Swarm-ECHO mission is presented.