Analysis of magnetic satellite data to infer the mantle electrical conductivity of telluric planets in the solar system
Résumé
Space missions launched to study the solar system planets generally involve a magnetometer in the scientific payload. The magnetic data may be used to infer the electrical conductivity of a planet's mantle using electromagnetic induction theory. The application of induction analysis on terrestrial bodies of the solar system other than the earth is challenging because of little information available about the external inducing sources. Here, we present a method to analyze magnetic data from these space missions that determines the geometry of the dominant external inducing magnetic field and deals with the inherent gaps in the satellite magnetic time series. We tested the approach on Earth synthetic satellite data generated to prepare the ESA magnetic mission Swarm and demonstrated the feasibility for recovering the 1-D conductivity part of the model used to generate these data. The analysis of real data from the Danish Ørsted magnetic mission provided satisfactory conductivity profiles of the Earth's mantle.