ARCAD-3

Arcad-3 was a Franco-Soviet collaboration, launched aboard the AUREOL-3 satellite on September 1981 from Pletsesk (Russia) into a quasi-polar orbit (apogee: ~2000 km, perigee: ~400 km, inclination: 82.5°, period: 109.5 minutes). French participation was supervised by CNES and includes instruments produced by CESR (now IRAP), GRI in Orléans and LGE in Saint-Maur.
The scientific payload was designed to study interactions between the ionosphere and the magnetosphere. These studies consisted on the detailed measurements of supra-thermal and thermal particles, the electrostatic waves, the electromagnetic waves, the quasi-static electric field, and finally, the magnetic field variations associated with field-aligned currents (Birkeland current).
The stabilized 3-axis AUREOL-3 of the satellite operated in different telemetry configurations: (a) direct and high bit rate in real time telemetry was transmitted to various ground stations that was mostly located at high latitudes and (b) onboard recording over interesting geophysical regions with subsequent transmission to ground stations.
Most of the useful AUREOL-3 data was obtained from November 1981 to June 1984 and are currently archived at CNES. So that, more than 800 sequences are directly accessible from the CDPP archive.

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