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I'm Jack Connerney, I work at Goddard here in the magnetometer group. My name is
Jared Espley, I'm a space scientist and I work in the Planetary Magnetospheres Lab.
Magnetic fields can be measured in a variety of ways, and the most simple way
is with a compass. The Earth's field is global in nature, so it has a north pole and
and a south pole, and wherever you go on the surface of the Earth with a compass,
it will point to the north pole. But on Mars if you were to walk around with a
compass, it would haphazardly point from one anomaly to the other as you
walked across the surface, so it's not quite as useful as a compass on Earth.
MAVEN is our next mission to Mars, it's an orbiter. It's designed to help us
understand what happened to the Martian climate over time, how the climate has
evolved over the lifetime of the solar system. We're looking at Mars today, and
we're looking at how the solar wind strips away what little atmosphere there
is today, and we'll try to roll that back in time and understand what an early
Mars might have looked like, and whether a magnetic field like the Earth has
could have protected that atmosphere from the solar wind. To measure the
magnetic field at Mars then, we use an instrument called a magnetometer. MAVEN
is carrying a pair of magnetometers. Now the spacecraft itself generates a
magnetic field so we have to put those magnetometers as far from the spacecraft
as we can, and we've done that by putting the sensors at the very outer end of the
solar arrays. The magnetometers, even though they're small, simple looking
instruments there's actually a great deal of sophisticated electronics and
testing and calibration that goes into building them. They're so sensitive that
we ask everyone to use non-magnetic tools when they're working on them. Even
if you had a tiny little fleck of metal that came off of or screwdriver that
would be enough to be noticeable and detected by the magnetometer. There's
no Maytag repairman in space. So we punish these instruments before we pack
them up and launch them, because we're not going to see them again and we have
to make darn sure that they're going to work. As a scientist, as the person who
will eventually be receiving this data and using it, it's very humbling and gratifying
to see all these other people working very hard to try and make sure that we
get the data that we would like to get here at Earth.
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