Years ago, magnetic field provided a
reference for navigation on earth.
So for four or five hundred years,
whenever ships crossed the ocean,
they carried compasses so they could find their way
when you can't see stars or land mass.
A magnetometer is like a fancy compass.
It measures both the direction
and the magnitude of the magnetic field.
So in this case we fly a magnetic sensor
at the very outer extremity of the spacecraft.
We're on what's called magnetometer boom,
which is about 12 feet in length
that's about twice as long as I am tall.
The primary purpose for our investigation
is to map the magnetic field of Jupiter
very accurately, and try to understand how it's generated,
deep down inside Jupiter,
in Jupiter's electrically conducting core.
What we're going to do is make very, very accurate measurements
in orbit about Jupiter,
and basically envelope Jupiter in a net, a dense net, of observations.
And that will give us the ability to image
what the magnetic field looks like down in Jupiter's core where it's generated.