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Music

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I'm Jack Connerney, I work at Goddard here in the magnetometer group. My name is

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Jared Espley, I'm a space scientist and I work in the Planetary Magnetospheres Lab.

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Magnetic fields can be measured in a variety of ways, and the most simple way

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is with a compass. The Earth's field is global in nature, so it has a north pole and

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and a south pole, and wherever you go on the surface of the Earth with a compass,

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it will point to the north pole. But on Mars if you were to walk around with a

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compass, it would haphazardly point from one anomaly to the other as you

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walked across the surface, so it's not quite as useful as a compass on Earth.

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MAVEN is our next mission to Mars, it's an orbiter. It's designed to help us

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understand what happened to the Martian climate over time, how the climate has

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evolved over the lifetime of the solar system. We're looking at Mars today, and

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we're looking at how the solar wind strips away what little atmosphere there

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is today, and we'll try to roll that back in time and understand what an early

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Mars might have looked like, and whether a magnetic field like the Earth has

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could have protected that atmosphere from the solar wind. To measure the

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magnetic field at Mars then, we use an instrument called a magnetometer. MAVEN

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is carrying a pair of magnetometers. Now the spacecraft itself generates a

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magnetic field so we have to put those magnetometers as far from the spacecraft

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as we can, and we've done that by putting the sensors at the very outer end of the

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solar arrays. The magnetometers, even though they're small, simple looking

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instruments there's actually a great deal of sophisticated electronics and

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testing and calibration that goes into building them. They're so sensitive that

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we ask everyone to use non-magnetic tools when they're working on them. Even

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if you had a tiny little fleck of metal that came off of or screwdriver that

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would be enough to be noticeable and detected by the magnetometer. There's

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no Maytag repairman in space. So we punish these instruments before we pack

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them up and launch them, because we're not going to see them again and we have

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to make darn sure that they're going to work. As a scientist, as the person who

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will eventually be receiving this data and using it, it's very humbling and gratifying

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to see all these other people working very hard to try and make sure that we

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get the data that we would like to get here at Earth.

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Music

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Beep, Beep, Beep