|Date of Launch:|
|22 November 2013|
|462 km to 511 km|
Swarm is the fifth Earth Explorer mission approved in ESA's Living Planet Programme, and was successfully launched on 22 November 2013. The research objectives of the Swarm mission is to provide the best-ever survey of the geomagnetic field and its temporal evolution as well as the electric field in the atmosphere using a constellation of 3 identical satellites: Swarm-Alpha, Swarm-Bravo and Swarm-Charlie.
For each Swarm Satellite, the payload consists of a set of seven instruments: Absolute Scalar Magnetometer (ASM), Vector Field Magnetometer (VFM), Star Tracker (STR), Electric Field Instrument (EFI), GPS Receiver (GPSR), Accelerometer (ACC), and Laser Retro-Reflector (LRR).
Detailed information on the Swarm instruments is available on the Swarm Mission webpage.
The following Swarm datasets are available and distributed to all the users:
- Level 1b products
- Level 2 products: Level-2 CAT1 and Level-2 CAT2
Below is reported a brief description of each dataset, more detailed information is available in the Swarm Data HandBook.
Swarm Level 1b products: the Level 1b products consist of time series of relevant quantities as observed along the orbit, corrected, calibrated and converted to physical units. The data are converted to engineering units using the best possible characterization data available.
Swarm Level 2 products: while the Level 1b products are produced per spacecraft, the Level 2 products benefit from the use of the three satellites of the Swarm constellation. The Level 2 products are generated from two different sources: PDGS and L2PS (consortium composed by scientists). Two different categories of Level 2 products are available:
Swarm Level 2 CAT-1 products: complex algorithms contributing to the generation of a Level 2 product of the various sources of the Earth‘s magnetic field, of thermospheric products, and for Precise Orbit determination. The products are processed by L2PS under ESA responsibility, and are distributed by the PDGS. Swarm Level 2 CAT-1 products can be further divided into:
- Level 2 CAT-1 products
- Level 2 CAT-1 validation Products (providing products validation reporting)
- Swarm Level 2 CAT-2 products: algorithms leading to a Level 2 product with minimum delay with respect to the generation of the corresponding Level 1b data. Level 2 CAT-2 products are generated and distributed on a daily basis by PDGS.