«The trim coils have proven extremely useful, not only by ensuring a balanced plasma exhaust onto the divertor plates, but also as a tool for the physicists to perform
magnetic field measurements of unprecedented accuracy,» said Thomas Sunn Pederson, Max Planck director of stellarator edge and divertor physics.
Based
on magnetic field measurements taken by the Messenger at an altitude as low as 9 miles, scientists have now discovered that Mercury, located just 36 million miles from the sun, possesses a magnetic field dating back almost four billion years.
Dougherty says the sensitivity of Cassini's
magnetic field measurements nearly quadrupled over the course of the spacecraft's 22 Grand Finale orbits — meaning that, if the tilt of Saturn's field is greater than 0.016 degrees, researchers should be able to detect it.
The dynamics of solar processes can be captured on shorter time scales, and the improved light - gathering capacity of the new telescopes allows us to extract more information from spectral lines with higher fidelity and accuracy, especially with respect to
magnetic field measurements.