The NASA MMS mission to study energy conversion in Earth's magnetosphere
Time: Wed 2015-06-03 13.00 - 14.00
Location: Sal E3, Osquarsbacke 14, KTH, Stockholm
Participating: Per-Arne Lindqvist
After over ten years of preparations, the four large spacecraft of NASAs Magnetospheric MultiScale mission, MMS, were launched on 13 March 2015, from Cape Canaveral in Florida, by an Atlas V rocket. The goal of this 1-billion dollar mission is to study energy conversion in Earth's magnetosphere, with focus on Earth's dayside, where solar wind energy is fed into the magnetosphere, and on the nightside, where the magnetic energy stored in the magnetic field, is transferred to energetic particle beams creating the aurora. The four spacecraft, each about 3.2 m in diameter and 1.2 m high, with a mass of 1200 kg, carry a sophisticated set of fields and particle instruments to make time and space measurements of the plasma environment. The Space and Plasma Physics group at KTH has main responsibility for the spin-plane electric field instrument.