SPP instruments celebrate 10 years in space on MMS

The NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission celebrates 10 years in space since its launch from Cape Canaveral on 13 March 2015. The 4 identical spacecraft follow each other closely in a highly elliptic orbit around the Earth reaching almost halfway to the moon, and carry a number of instruments for high-resolution measurements of particles and fields.

The Division of Space and Plasma Physics (SPP) is responsible for the Spin-plane Double Probe electric field instrument and for the Low-Voltage Power Supply which powers all the six instruments onboard measuring electric and magnetic fields.

The mission has vastly improved our understanding of the physical processes involved in the transfer of particles and energy from the solar wind into and within the Earth's magnetosphere. In particular, the process of magnetic reconnection has been extensively studied with the extremely high quality field and particle data obtained by the MMS instruments. Reconnection is an important process in all magnetic plasmas, from the laboratory and near-Earth space to the Sun and large astrophysical objects in the universe. Over 1500 scientific papers have been published with results from MMS.

Several PhD students at SPP have been and are working with MMS data to study the interaction between the solar wind and the Earth's magnetosphere around the boundary layers called bow shock and magnetopause. The PhD theses by Savvas Raptis (2022) and Martin Lindberg (2024) were based mainly on MMS data.

For more information, see NASAs anniversary page at MMS mission turns 10 and
MMS Magnetospheric Multiscale