MMS Overview and Highlights
Friday, October 2, 2015: 8:00 AM
James L Burch1, Roy B Torbert2,3, Thomas Earle Moore4, Barbara L Giles5, Robert E Ergun6, Craig J Pollock7, Barry Mauk8, Stephen A Fuselier1, Rumi Nakamura9, Christopher T Russell10, Robert J Strangeway10, Olivier Le Contel11, Per-Arne Lindqvist12, Yoshifumi Saito13, J Bernard Blake14, Werner Magnes15, Michael Hesse5, Tai Phan16, Craig Kletzing17, Manfred Steller15, Daniel N. Baker18, Melvin Goldstein5, Martin V Goldman19 and Christopher K Pankratz20, (1)Southwest Research Institute San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, United States, (2)Univ New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States, (3)Southwest Research Institute Durham, Durham, NH, United States, (4)NASA Goddard Space Flight Ctr, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (5)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (6)University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, United States, (7)NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (8)Applied Physics Laboratory Johns Hopkins, Laurel, MD, United States, (9)Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria, (10)University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (11)Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas (UMR7648), CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique/UPMC/Univ. Paris Sud/Obs. de Paris, Paris, France, (12)KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, (13)ISAS Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Kanagawa, Japan, (14)Aerospace Corporation Santa Monica, Santa Monica, CA, United States, (15)Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria, (16)University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States, (17)University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United States, (18)University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (19)University of Colorado at Boulder, Physics, Boulder, CO, United States, (20)Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Boulder, CO, United States
Abstract:
The Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, launched on March 12, 2015, is conducting a definitive experiment on magnetic reconnection in the boundary regions of the Earth’s magnetosphere. Comprehensive measurements, some with unprecedented capabilities and cadence, are made on each of four identically-instrumented spacecraft flying in close formation (separations from 10 to 160 km on the day side and up to 400 km on the night side). The targets of the mission are the known reconnection regions along the dayside magnetopause and the neutral sheet in the magnetic tail. Of special interest are kinetic plasma processes spanning the ion and electron scales, plasma turbulence associated with reconnection, and energetic particles accelerated by the reconnection process. The instruments and spacecraft are on schedule to be fully commissioned by September 1, 2015 when the first of two scans of the dayside magnetopause will begin. By the time of this conference we anticipate acquiring data from the first set of magnetopause crossings and associated reconnection regions. The reported results will be compared with contemporary theories and models of reconnection.
