Freja – the goddess of the magnetosphere?

Freja was not a deity in a chariot pulled by two cats as the Nordic mythology tells us but rather Sweden’s second scientific satellite launched 31 years ago from the Gobi desert in China. It explored the lower parts (below 1700 km) of the magnetosphere with E-field-, wave-, and particle instruments as well as a UV imager. Instruments and other contributions came from several countries (Sweden, Germany, Canada, USA). For four years data were received by ground stations in Sweden and Canada. Germany contributed 25% of the cost of the project and was the major partner. The E-field instrument was provided by the Space and Plasma Physics group at KTH. The speaker was the project manager of Freja and will outline the salient points of the development of the project and how space projects were organized in the early personal computer era and just before the advent of the World Wide Web when fax machines were still around and when paper and pencil was used in engineering!