Fast Field Trips: Magnetic Test Facility

Narration:

Transcript:

I think it is pretty rustic. If there’s a more rustic facility, I don’t know of it. Welcome. We are in Area 300, where we have all our magnetic testing facilities. This is a 22-foot coil system, and this is what we’re going to talk about today, and how we’ve been using this over decades to develop magnetometry. A magnetometer is a device, the ones that we build are vector magnetometers, and they measure the amplitude and the direction of the magnetic field in a very precise way. Whenever we want to evaluate our magnetometer, we need to know what the magnetometer is seeing versus what is the field around it so that we can make those corrections. So one of the ways we do that is by having the system of reference magnetometers, we have a zero-field magnetometer. So that one’s going to give us the direction and the amplitude, and that one we actually use to make sure that we can zero out the field here. This particular coil system was built in 1965. After this facility was built, they had some things that they learned from this facility, and they applied it to building one that’s twice the size of this coil system, twice the size of this. And one of the things that they use that for was magnetic characterization of the Apollo rover. So distance really is your friend when it comes to keeping the magnetometer clean. And that even happens on the spacecraft where we have magnetometers on the end of a boom to get it away from the spacecraft, which gives us the signature. Our magnetometers from our lab have gone to every planet in the solar system.