WEBVTT

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Years ago, magnetic field provided a

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reference for navigation on earth.

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So for four or five hundred years,

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whenever ships crossed the ocean,

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they carried compasses so they could find their way

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when you can't see stars or land mass.

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A magnetometer is like a fancy compass.

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It measures both the direction

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and the magnitude of the magnetic field.

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So in this case we fly a magnetic sensor

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at the very outer extremity of the spacecraft.

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We're on what's called magnetometer boom,

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which is about 12 feet in length

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that's about twice as long as I am tall.

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The primary purpose for our investigation

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is to map the magnetic field of Jupiter

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very accurately, and try to understand how it's generated,

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deep down inside Jupiter,

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in Jupiter's electrically conducting core.

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What we're going to do is make very, very accurate measurements

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in orbit about Jupiter,

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and basically envelope Jupiter in a net, a dense net, of observations.

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And that will give us the ability to image

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what the magnetic field looks like down in Jupiter's core where it's generated.