The goals of the Project are two fold: On one hand to perform the daily inflight calibration for the Flux Gate Magnetometer (FGM) instruments onboard the four ESA Cluster satellites, on the other hand to perform Earth bow shock studies and simulations based on the FGM data measured at Cluster bow shock crossings:

a) Development of a software package to facilitate an automatic use of existing calibration software. This includes interval selection, data visualization, batch processing, and archiving of the calibration parameters. The existing software is designed for performing the calibration one day at a time and requires user interaction for each calibration parameter to be determined.

b) Identify data intervals suitable to be used for the daily calibration. For the lowest range (r2) an automatic selection procedure will be used. Ideally these are intervals with low magnetic field and low variation. For the higher ranges calibration, either intervals adjacent to the range changes or manually selected intervals are used.

c) Performing the FGM daily calibration. This will be done by using an automatic batch calibration over several days, followed by manual check and validation of the results and manual calibration for the days where the automatic found calibration parameters do not deliver the requested quality.

d) The study of nonstationary events taking place at the Earth bowshock. In particular, the project will perform an in detph comparison of the theoretical results for the electron dynamics at high Mach number quasi perpendicular collisionless shocks with the calibrated FGM measurements making use of advanced computer simulations.