MGS Aerobraking Pass Image

Connerney, J.E.P. and C.L. Ladd

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Illustration of an MGS aerobraking pass over the Mars crust and the thin plate model used to interpret the observations. The model consists of 20 thin (30 km thick) uniformly magnetized plates, infinite in extent east-west, and 200 km wide. A generalized inverse method was used to determine the intensity and direction of magnetization in each of the plates to best fit the x (north) and z (down) components of the observed vector magnetic field (the east component of the field was small, and should be zero, for this source geometry). See Connerney et al., Science, 1999.