Abstract

In the nearly two decades that CubeSats have been in significant use, over 800 have been launched, and many more are under construction. They have gained popularity in the industry and are often the choice for most first-time small-satellite missions. The University of Southern California’s (USC) Space Engineering Research Center (SERC) has developed a 1.5 U student-built science mission called Magneto. Magneto is USC’s fourth CubeSat mission, and it has the goal of mapping the Earth’s magnetic field in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) using Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware, to determine the viability of using COTS sensors to decrease the mission cost by a hundred-fold from similar missions using dedicated science instruments, while offering similar levels of precision.

Date

September 22, 2025

Authors

Lizette Villafana, Jessica Yuan, Liam Broadus, Warren Su, Claire Carlton, Ava Norrell, Rahul Rughani, Eugene Park, David Barnhart