Magnetic Data

Not all planetary magnetic fields come from simulations - some come from carefully inverting the sparse, noisy measurements that spacecraft actually recorded. The Iridium communications satellites illustrate this well: their 66 satellites carry magnetometers too coarse to be useful individually, but together sample each point on Earth every nine minutes, and this dense repeated sampling significantly increases the signal to noise ratio for studying Earth’s internal and external magnetic fields.

Related publications:

• Iridium Communications Satellite Constellation Data for Study of Earth’s Magnetic Field - Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (2021)