MMS Science Overview: The Mysteries of MMS

This short video outlines the MMS mission and its first results. Since it launched, MMS has made more than 4,000 trips through the magnetic boundaries around Earth, each time gathering information about the way the magnetic fields and particles move. A surprising result was that at the moment of interconnection between the sun’s magnetic field lines and those of Earth the crescents turned abruptly so that the electrons flowed along the field lines. By watching these electron tracers, MMS made the first observation of the predicted breaking and interconnection of magnetic fields in space. Credit: NASA/GSFCWatch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel. Artist depiction of the MMS spacecraft. Credit: NASA/GSFC Animation depicting magnetic reconnection, when magnetic field lines connect and disconnect, explosively transferring energy. Credit: NASA/GSFC This numerical simulation represents the event observed with MMS. It shows magnetic field lines in black with the background color denoting the electric current density directed out of the plane. Red regions have stronger electric currents. The breaking of magnetic fields in these high current regions is magnetic reconnection. In the event observed by MMS, Earth would be to the left and the Sun would be far to the right. The spacecraft crossed through the region where reconnection occurs in the vertical direction. The movie is courtesy of Paul Cassak, Department of Physics and Astronomy, West Virginia University, with input from Tai Phan (Berkeley), Jim Burch (SwRI), and Jerry Goldstein (SwRI). The movie was made using computational resources from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center, a Department of Energy user facility. This infographic describes some of the places throughout the universe where magnetic reconnection appears.Credit: NASA/GSFC Like sending sensors up into a hurricane, NASA has flown four spacecraft through an invisible maelstrom in space, called magnetic reconnection. Magnetic reconnection is one of the prime drivers of space radiation and so it is a key factor in the quest to learn more about our space environment and protect our spacecraft and astronauts as we explore farther and farther from Earth. A new paper printed on May 12 in Science, provides the first observations from inside a magnetic reconnection event. The research shows that magnetic reconnection is dominated by the electrons in space and the physics that drives them – thus providing the first ever information for what powers this fundamental process in nature. The effects of this sudden release of particles and energy – such as giant eruptions on the sun, the aurora, radiation storms in near-Earth space, high energy cosmic particles that come from other galaxies -- have been observed throughout the solar system and beyond. But we have never been able to witness this phenomenon of magnetic reconnection directly. Satellites have observed tantalizing glances of particles speeding by, but not the impetus -- like seeing the debris flung out from a tornado, but never seeing the storm itself. MMS is made of four identical spacecraft that launched in March 2015. They fly in a pyramid formation to create a full 3-dimensional map of any phenomena it observes. On October 16, 2015, the spacecraft traveled straight through a magnetic reconnection event at the boundary where Earth’s magnetic field bumps up against the sun’s magnetic field. Related pages

Watch this video on the NASAexplorer YouTube channel.For complete transcript, click here. Senior Project Scientist Tom Moore outlines the three instrument suites onboard the four MMS spacecraft. For More InformationSee [www.nasa.gov/MMS](www.nasa.gov/MMS) Related pages

Four NASA spacecraft will probe the near-space environment around our planet for magnetic explosions. Find out more about the MMS mission in this video. On the night side of Earth, magnetic reconnection is believed to help trigger aurorae. On the day side of Earth, magnetic reconnection funnels material and energy from the sun into Earth's magnetic environment. The MMS spacecraft will observe magnetic reconnection events by traveling through known reconnection regions near Earth. For More InformationSee [NASA.gov](http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/science-of-magnetic-reconnection/#.VLaaLS9bzxt) Related pages

MMS Launch and Deployment Animation This animation follows Magnetosphere Multiscale(MMS) Mission from launch at Kennedy Space Center through deployment and on station doing science. The MMS mission is comprising four identically instrumented spacecraft that will use Earth’s magnetosphere as a laboratory to study the microphysics of three fundamental plasma processes: magnetic reconnection, energetic particle acceleration, and turbulence. Related pages

Watch this video on the NASAexplorer YouTube channel. Orbit video without narration Scientist John Dorelli explains the MMS mission's orbit and why the four spacecraft fly in a tetrahedron formation. On its journey, MMS will observe a little-understood, but universal phenomenon called magnetic reconnection, responsible for dramatic re-shaping of the magnetic environment near Earth, often sending intense amounts of energy and fast-moving particles off in a new direction. Not only is this a fundamental physical process that occurs throughout the universe, it is also one of the drivers of space weather events at Earth. To truly understanding the process, requires four identical spacecraft to track how such reconnection events move across and through any given space in 3D. Related pages

Watch this video on the NASAexplorer YouTube channel. The Magnetospheric Multiscale, or MMS, mission stacked all four of its spacecraft in preparation for vibration testing. This time lapse shows one image every thirty seconds over three days of work. First, the spacecraft are assembled into mini-stacks, or placed on top of each other in sets of two. To create a full stack, engineers lift one mini-stack on top of another.Vibration testing simulates the conditions that the MMS spacecraft will experience during launch.MMS will study how the sun and the Earth's magnetic fields connect and disconnect, an explosive process that can accelerate particles through space to nearly the speed of light. This process is called magnetic reconnection and can occur throughout all space. For More InformationSee [NASA.gov](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mms/index.html#.U056NsfdFKo) Related pages

MMS beauty pass showing 4 observatories on the dayside. Beauty pass showing the MMS spacecraft flying on the nightside. The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission is a Solar Terrestrial Probes mission comprising four identically instrumented spacecraft that will use Earth’s magnetosphere as a laboratory to study the microphysics of three fundamental plasma processes: magnetic reconnection, energetic particle acceleration, and turbulence. These processes occur in all astrophysical plasma systems but can be studied in situ only in our solar system and most efficiently only in Earth’s magnetosphere, where they control the dynamics of the geospace environment and play an important role in the processes known as “space weather.”Learn more about MMS at www.nasa.gov/mms Related pages