NASA To Probe Earth's Magnetic Field

A new NASA Solar Terrestrial Probe mission is going to shed light on one mysterious event called magnetic reconnection, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Magnetic reconnection occurs when magnetic lines of force cross, cancel, and reconnect releasing magnetic energy in the form of heat and charged-particle kinetic energy. Magnetic reconnection is a description of the tearing mode resistive instability in plasma, in which the plasma resistivity leads to dissipation of free magnetic energy on a timescale intermediate between slow diffusion and fast Alfven relaxation.

The magnetic reconnection on the sun causes solar flares, which are more powerful than several atomic bombs combined. The reconnection in Earth’s atmosphere dispenses magnetic storms and auroras and in laboratories on Earth it can cause big problems in fusion reactors.

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NASA is set to launch a satellite in 2014 that will greatly increase the understanding of the phenomenon when it launches the magnetospheric multiscale (MMS) mission, a suite of four identical spacecraft that will study magnetic reconnection in the best possible laboratory, the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Currently, MMS is scheduled to launch in August 2014 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida aboard an Atlas V rocket.

The spacecraft will obtain measurements necessary to test prevailing theories as to how reconnection is enabled and how it progresses. Although the study of magnetic reconnection dates back to the 1950s and despite numerous scientific papers addressing this perplexing issue, scientists still cannot agree on one accepted model.

MMS was approved for implementation in June 2009 following a successful Preliminary Design Review in May 2009. The MMS science team will be led by James Burch of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

“Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental physical process that occurs throughout the universe. MMS will enable us to study this dynamic process in the near-Earth space environment, where it transfers energy from the solar wind to the magnetosphere and drives disturbances known as space weather,” said James Burch.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland is the lead Center for the mission. Engineers will perform the required environmental testing, build the spacecraft and integrate all four sets of instruments into the MMS satellites, support launch vehicle integration and operations, and develop the Mission Operations Center to monitor and control the spacecraft.

The MMS will carry identical suites of plasma analyzers, energetic particle detectors, magnetometers, and electric field instruments as well as a device to prevent spacecraft charging from interfering with the highly sensitive measurements required in and around the diffusion regions.

Scientists and engineers at Goddard have designed and will build the Fast Plasma Instrument, which will measure the ion and electron distributions and the electric and magnetic fields with unprecedentedly high millisecond time resolution and accuracy.

Recently, NASA and members of an independent review board painstakingly reviewed every aspect of the MMS mission, and successfully completed the mission’s critical design review.

NASA said this technical review is held to ensure that a mission can proceed into fabrication, demonstration and test and can meet stated performance requirements, including cost, schedule, risk and other system constraints.

“This is the last hurdle before the spacecraft and instrument teams begin to build actual flight hardware,” said Mark Adrian, MMS deputy project scientist of NASA’s Goddard.