Precision Magnetometers for Aerospace Applications

TL;DR

This paper reviews the role of high-precision optical magnetometers in aerospace, highlighting recent technological advances that enable new applications in navigation, exploration, and unmanned vehicle control.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of optical magnetometer technologies, focusing on recent progress and future potential for aerospace applications.

Findings

Optical magnetometers achieve higher sensitivity and lower size, weight, and power compared to traditional sensors.

Recent advances enable new aerospace applications such as unmanned vehicle navigation and planetary exploration.

Emerging magnetometer types include atomic, diamond defect-based, and optomechanical sensors.

Abstract

Aerospace technologies are crucial for modern civilization; space-based infrastructure underpins weather forecasting, communications, terrestrial navigation and logistics, planetary observations, solar monitoring, and other indispensable capabilities. Extraplanetary exploration -- including orbital surveys and (more recently) roving, flying, or submersible unmanned vehicles -- is also a key scientific and technological frontier, believed by many to be paramount to the long-term survival and prosperity of humanity. All of these aerospace applications require reliable control of the craft and the ability to record high-precision measurements of physical quantities. Magnetometers deliver on both of these aspects, and have been vital to the success of numerous missions. In this review paper, we provide an introduction to the relevant instruments and their applications. We consider past and present magnetometers, their proven aerospace applications, and emerging uses. We then look to the future, reviewing recent progress in magnetometer technology. We particularly focus on magnetometers that use optical readout, including atomic magnetometers, magnetometers based on quantum defects in diamond, and optomechanical magnetometers. These optical magnetometers offer a combination of field sensitivity, size, weight, and power consumption that allows them to reach performance regimes that are inaccessible with existing techniques. This promises to enable new applications in areas ranging from unmanned vehicles to navigation and exploration.