239-All-NASA – How Will the 4 MMS Spacecraft Launch and Deploy?

The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, a scientific satellite–development project managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, is both an in-house project and a contracted one. The four MMS spacecraft are being developed by Goddard; the 100 MMS instruments are being developed under contract to Goddard. MMS offers examples of the advantages and disadvantages of both kinds of work, and the challenge of combining the two.

In March of 2015, an unprecedented NASA mission will launch to study a process so mysterious that no one has ever directly measured it in action. To create the first-ever 3-dimensional maps of this process, a process called magnetic reconnection, which occurs all over the universe, the Magnetospheric Multiscale, or MMS, mission uses four separate spacecraft equipped with ultra high speed instruments.

Watch the video to get a sneak preview of how MMS will make this journey: The four spacecraft are housed in a single rocket on their trip into space. One by one, each ejects out, before moving into a giant pyramid-shaped configuration. Next each spacecraft deploys its six booms.

Once in orbit, MMS will fly through regions near Earth where this little-understood process of magnetic reconnection occurs. Magnetic reconnection happens in thin layers just miles thick, but can tap into enough power at times to create gigantic explosions many times the size of Earth.