NASA Computational Case Study: Modeling Planetary Magnetic and Gravitational Fields

In this case study, we model a planet´s magnetic and gravitational fields using spherical harmonic functions. As an exercise, we analyze data on the Earth´s magnetic field collected by NASA´s MAGSAT spacecraft, and use it to derive a simple magnetic field model based on these spherical harmonic functions. The Web extra contains an ASCII text file of Magsat data, as mentioned in the article.