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Projecte llegit

Títol: Data analysis and ground verification for ILIADA

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: GIL PONS, PILAR

Departament: FIS

Títol: Data analysis and ground verification for ILIADA

Data inici oferta: 06-02-2026     Data finalització oferta: 06-10-2026


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    MU AEROSPACE S&T 21
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: Fora UPC    
 
        Supervisor/a extern: Miquel Nofrarias Serra
        Institució/Empresa: Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya
        Titulació del Director/a: Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Cataluny
 
Paraules clau:
Gravitational waves, LISA, ILIADA, magnetometer, magnetic field, Birkeland currents, Field-Aligned Currents, space instrumentation, data processing.
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission requires precise monitoring of the spacecraft environment to achieve its scientific goals. ILIADA (In-flight LISA Diagnostics In-orbit Demonstrator) is an in-orbit mission designed to validate key diagnostic technologies and data analysis methods in preparation for LISA.

This Master's thesis focuses on the data analysis and ground verification of the ILIADA payload, with emphasis on magnetic diagnostics. The work includes the development of data processing algorithms for onboard sensors, modeling of magnetic field contributions, and the detection and characterization of external magnetic disturbances such as Birkeland currents. Signal processing and noise reduction techniques are applied to extract relevant physical information from experimental data.
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will open a new observational window on the Universe by detecting gravitational waves in the low-frequency regime. The high sensitivity required by space-based gravitational-wave observatories makes it necessary to develop and validate technologies capable of identifying and characterizing environmental disturbances that could affect the measurements. In this context, the ILIADA (In-orbit LISA Diagnostics Demonstrator) mission aims to test and characterize a first version of the sensors that will form part of the LISA Science Diagnostics Subsystem (SDS) onboard the GENEO-02 satellite. Among its scientific objectives, ILIADA will investigate magnetic-field perturbations associated with Birkeland currents, also known as Field-Aligned Currents (FACs), which provide an important coupling mechanism between the magnetosphere and the ionosphere.

The main objective of this thesis is to develop a data processing methodology for the detection and characterization of Birkeland currents using the magnetic measurements provided by the ILIADA instrumentation. Since the GENEO-02 spacecraft has not yet been launched, synthetic measurements representative of the expected in-flight conditions are generated to develop, test and validate the proposed processing pipeline. To support this development and validation, ground-test measurements are also analyzed to characterize the instrument and assess the performance of the magnetic measurement system prior to deployment.

The proposed methodology includes the initial processing and conditioning of the measurements, magnetometer calibration, attitude determination, frequency-domain filtering and the extraction of magnetic-field perturbations associated with Field-Aligned Currents. A synthetic data generation framework is also developed to reproduce the expected magnetic environment along the spacecraft orbit, including the background geomagnetic field and spacecraft dynamics. The resulting pipeline provides a framework for the analysis of future ILIADA in-flight measurements and contributes to the preparation and validation of the mission's magnetic-field diagnostic capabilities.

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