Abstract
Abstract The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission and operations are designed to provide the maximum reconnection science. The mission phases are chosen to investigate reconnection at the dayside magnetopause and in the magnetotail. At the dayside, the MMS orbits are chosen to maximize encounters with the magnetopause in regions where the probability of encountering the reconnection diffusion region is high. In the magnetotail, the orbits are chosen to maximize encounters with the neutral sheet, where reconnection is known to occur episodically. Although this targeting is limited by engineering constraints such as total available fuel, high science return orbits exist for launch dates over most of the year. The tetrahedral spacecraft formation has variable spacing to determine the optimum separations for the reconnection regions at the magnetopause and in the magnetotail. In the specific science regions of interest, the spacecraft are operated in a fast survey mode with continuous acquisition of burst mode data. Later, burst mode triggers and a ground-based scientist in the loop are used to determine the highest quality data to downlink for analysis. This operations scheme maximizes the science return for the mission.
Highlights
The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission uses the Earth’s magnetosphere as a laboratory to study magnetic reconnection
The MMS mission design is fundamentally different from other multispacecraft magnetospheric missions in that it targets this very small electron diffusion region, which the four identically instrumented spacecraft, flying in a tetrahedral configuration, probe over a range of interspacecraft separations
This paper describes the MMS mission design and operations
Summary
The MMS mission uses the Earth’s magnetosphere as a laboratory to study magnetic reconnection The scale sizes may be a factor of about 3 times larger in thickness and width It is unclear how far the reconnection region extends across the tail, it must be of the order of thousands of kilometers, similar to its extent on the magnetopause. In the electron diffusion regions at the magnetopause and in the magnetotail, thermal electrons in the plasma become de-magnetized through a process that is yet unknown (one of the prime objectives of MMS is to discover this process). The MMS mission design is fundamentally different from other multispacecraft magnetospheric missions in that it targets this very small electron diffusion region, which the four identically instrumented spacecraft, flying in a tetrahedral configuration, probe over a range of interspacecraft separations.
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