DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15602914
title: Spacecraft Radio Signal Polarization Calibration: Part 1 of 2

description: REVIEW THE DETAILS BELOW ON THE FILE CONTENTS OR ELSE YOU WILL WASTE A LOT OF YOUR TIME!!!

These are the data sets which are plotted in the paper titled, "Spacecraft Radio Signal Polarization Calibration". It's abstract states:

The only reliable method to remotely obtain magnetic field information across large swaths of interplanetary/interstellar plasma is with the measurement of Faraday rotation of polarized radio signals. Focusing on the high frequency regime of magnetized plasmas, this paper discusses the most difficult first step toward obtaining these measurements. Transitioning from raw voltage samples to plane of polarization measurements requires both simulated signal tests and qualitative inspections of the behavior of the resulting measurements. To demonstrate how this calibration approach works, we show examples collected from the STEREO A and B spacecraft and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. While astronomical radio sources have their own challenges to data processing, we show that spacecraft data have their own unique characteristics that can benefit and hinder the data processing.

These files contain the FFT spectra for each second of data and are organized as follows:

fftdataYYYYMMDDhhmmss.+++.tar.gz

data: occasionally is clear which spacecraft; if it's just the placeholder "data" then which is which needs to refer to the list at the bottom of this description text.

YYYY: year data was acquired

MM: month

DD: day

hh: hour

mm: minute

ss: second the observing started

+++: the 200 second addition to ss

When the files are extracted from the tar archive, there is an additional ".val." after the "+++". This value gives you the second within the 200 seconds.

The extracted files are all csv, so they are straightforward to read by all systems. They are organized in the following columns; occassionally one may have slipped through with this information in rows, so don't be suprised. HERE IS THE IMPORTANT DETAIL I WAS WARNING ABOUT.

column 1: frequency (Hz)

column 2: IF year is 2014, THEN this is real component of right-handed circularly polarized. ELSE it is the real component of left-handed circularly polarized.

column 3: IF year is 2014, THEN this is imaginary component of right-handed circularly polarized. ELSE it is the imaginary component of left-handed circularly polarized.

column 4: IF year is 2014, THEN this is real component of left-handed circularly polarized. ELSE it is the real component of right-handed circularly polarized.

column 5: IF year is 2014, THEN this is imaginary component of left-handed circularly polarized. ELSE it is the imaginary component of right-handed circularly polarized.

Spacecraft observing dates:

STEREO-B: 20140508, 20150404

STEREO-A: 20140512, 20150207, 20150321, 20150420

The Second Half of the Data Set is Posted Here: https://zenodo.org/records/17127847

Code:

A code snippet with commands for how to reproduce the exact curves shown in the paper is available. However, because AI is regularly scraping this website (over 200 downloads when the link has not been provided to anyone except internal reviewers), the code is behind a minimal paywall here: https://acs-consulting.com/product/zenodo-code-snippet/