MMS
Magnetospheric Multiscale
Constellation that investigates Earth's magnetosphere
The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission is a Solar Terrestrial Probes Program mission within NASA’s Heliophysics Division. The MMS mission, consisting of four identically instrumented spacecraft, uses Earth’s magnetosphere as a laboratory to study magnetic reconnection, a fundamental plasma-physical process that taps the energy stored in a magnetic field and converts it—typically explosively—into heat and kinetic energy in the form of charged particle acceleration and large-scale flows of matter.
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Launch date: March 12, 2015
Prime Mission: 2 years
Lead Institution: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Lead Funding Agency: NASA’s Heliophysics Division
Partners: Southwest Research Institute (SWRI), University of New Hampshire, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHP/APL), Rice University, Austrian Academy of Sciences