Dual Technique Magnetometer - sswelm/KSP-Interstellar-Extended GitHub Wiki
Magnetometers ( wikipedia ) are used aboard spacecraft and satellites, mostly for scientific investigations, plus attitude sensing. Magnetometers are among the most widely used scientific instruments in exploratory and observation satellites . A magnetometer is used to measure the magnetic field of a planetary body, it displays the absolute strength of the magnetic field and the components of magnetic field in the radial and azimuthal directions.
- |B|: Absolute magnitude of magnetic field strength, a measure of the overall magnetic field strength.
- B_r: Strength of the magnetic field pointing in the radial direction.
- B_T: Strength of the magnetic field pointing in the azimuthal direction (north->south perpendicular to the surface).
- Antimatter Flux: The amount of antimatter available per second, milligrams per second.
All of these values are reported using scientific notation ( wikipedia ), which is a concise way of printing very small and very large numbers.
For example, 1.23E4 represents 1.23 × 104. 104 equals 10,000, so this evaluates to 12,300. Small numbers are handled the same way, but with a negative exponent: 1.23E-4 represents 1.23 × 10-4, which evaluates to 0.000123. Scientific notation is used in science and engineering because you are less likely to make an error when reading or writing with them; you can't leave out a zero or add too many by accident. It is also easier to do arithmetic on them, because you can use the rules of algebra to simplify things; multiplication of two numbers in scientific notation involves adding the exponents together, rather than counting out the zeros.
The antimatter flux is presented in milligrams per second (mg/s). This is handy because the capacity of your tank is measured in milligrams. All you have to do is multiply the rate shown by the magnetometer by the amount of time you are going to wait and you can compute how much antimatter you will collect. For example, at about 100km above Kerbin on one of my craft: 1.586057E-006 mg/s × 6 hours = 1.586057E-6 mg/s × 21600 seconds = 1.586057E-6 mg/s × 2.16E4 s = (1.586057 × 2.16) × 10(-6 + 4) mg = 3.42588312E-2 mg = .0342 milligrams of antimatter, after waiting one Kerbal day. You can probably find a better spot; just remember that a larger magnetic field traps more antiprotons, and traps them for longer.
The Magnetometer is also capable of generating science reports.