Tag: sodium

Ground-based lasers vie with satellites to map Earth’s magnetic field

Lasers vie with satellites to map magnetic fields

February 14, 2011:

Oil and mineral companies, climatologists and geophysicists all rely on expensive satellites to measure the Earth’s magnetic field, but there may be a cheaper option. UC Berkeley physicist Dmitry Budker proposes shining a pulsed orange laser on the layer of sodium atoms 90 km above the Earth to directly read the local magnetic field.