Magnetospheric Multiscale Overview and Science Objectives

Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS), a NASA four-spacecraft constellation mission launched on March 12, 2015, will investigate magnetic reconnection in the boundary regions of the Earth's magnetosphere, particularly along its dayside boundary with the solar wind and the neutral sheet in the magnetic tail. The most important goal of MMS is to conduct a definitive experiment to determine what causes magnetic field lines to reconnect in a collisionless plasma. The significance of the MMS results will extend far beyond the Earth's magnetosphere because reconnection is known to occur in interplanetary space and in the solar corona where it is responsible for solar flares and the disconnection events known as coronal mass ejections. Active research is also being conducted on reconnection in the laboratory and specifically in magnetic-confinement fusion devices in which it is a limiting factor in achieving and maintaining electron temperatures high enough to initiate fusion. Finally, reconnection is proposed as the cause of numerous phenomena throughout the universe such as comet-tail disconnection events, magnetar flares, supernova ejections, and dynamics of neutron-star accretion disks. The MMS mission design is focused on answering specific questions about reconnection at the Earth's magnetosphere. The prime focus of the mission is on determining the kinetic processes occurring in the electron diffusion region that are responsible for reconnection and that determine how it is initiated; but the mission will also place that physics into the context of the broad spectrum of physical processes associated with reconnection. Connections to other disciplines such as solar physics, astrophysics, and laboratory plasma physics are expected to be made through theory and modeling as informed by the MMS results.