Freja
The launch of Sweden's Freja (a goddess from Norse mythology) satellite by PRC as a piggyback payload on 6 October 1992 marked the nation's second geophysics satellite. In 1986, Sweden launched (piggyback with SPOT-1) the Viking geophysics satellite, which operated for over 14 months. The focus of both missions was observation of the aurora. The Freja project is managed by the Swedish National Space Board and controlled from Swedish Space Corporation's (SSC) Esrange ground station. Swedish Space Corporation acted as prime contractor for Freja, while the Max Planck Institute's Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, served as a scientific partner on the project. The eight sensors on Freja (three Swedish, two German, two Canadian, and one American) detect electric and magnetic fields, hot and cold plasmas, waves and particles, and aurora. The 214-kg, 2.2-m diameter, dish-shaped Freja operates in an elliptical orbit of about 600 km by 1,800 km at an inclination of 63 degrees (Reference 76).
From its experience in developing Freja, SSC designed a much smaller satellite platform, Freja-C, with a total mass of less than 30 kg. The first application of the Freja-C bus will be the Astrid 1 spacecraft scheduled for launch in early 1995 by a Russian Cosmos booster as a piggyback payload. From its roughly 1,000-km, 83 degree orbit, Astrid 1 will image the aurora with two ultra-violet sensors and will also carry an energetic neutral atom analyzer and an electron spectrometer. The 28-kg, spin-stabilized spacecraft is based on a 0.4-m wide cube with four 0.4 m by 0.4 m solar panels. An Astrid 2 spacecraft is tentatively planned for another geophysics mission in a similar orbit in 1996 (References 56, 77-78).
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