Magnetometers for NASA's Mars Mission

The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has built and delivered magnetometers for the NASA's Mars Atmosphere And Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission.

The MAVEN mission aims to understand the upper atmosphere of Mars. It will help better understand the Mars climate evolution and determine the loss of atmospheric gases into space over time. The current rate of escape will be measured, which along with other data will aid in understanding the evolution.

Three suites of instrument will be carried by MAVEN. The neutral gas and ion mass spectrometer, from NASA Goddard, the remote sensing package, built by University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (CU/LASP) and the particles and fields package developed by NASA Goddard, CU/LASP and the University of California at Berkeley.

The spectrometer will be used to measure the isotopes and composition of neutral ions. The global characteristics of the ionosphere and the upper atmosphere will be observed by the remote sensing package. The ionosphere and the solar wind will be characterized by the particles and fields package.

The Magnetometer Instrument Lead at NASA Goddard, Jack Connerney, states that in order to comprehend particle motion, the behavior of the magnetic field in the Mars environment has to be visualized. The magnetometers form part of the particles and fields package. The magnetic field at a particular place of the spacecraft will be measured using a pair of flux gate magnetometers. The spacecraft may generate stray magnetic fields and hence the magnetometer sensors will be set at the extreme ends of the solar panels. Magnetic fields govern the motion of charged particles that escape, and the magnetometer measurement plays a crucial role in understanding the interaction of the solar wind with the Mars atmosphere and the way the loss of the particles occurs.

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