Click on the above still image to go to a page identical to this one but with the animated GIF movie in place of the still. The movie is about 3.4 MB in size; if you would prefer to save it to disk separately, you can use your browser's capabilities and this link to download it directly and skip loading it into your browser.
This is a noon-midnight orbit that traverses the South Atlantic Anomaly region in eclipse; the spacecraft pointing strategy is "j-perp", with no ram avoidance constraint. The behavior of the spacecraft is simplified by the removal of the ram constraint; except for periods in coast mode, the spacecraft is able to maintain the desired angles between the instrument pointing direction and the magnetic field vector or its projection into the sun-normal plane. There are a couple of times when the spacecraft spins rapidly to as the magnetic field comes close to the sunline and its projection on the sun-normal plane shortens and rotates rapidly, but there are none of the 180° flips when the equator is crossed in the low-field region.
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