NASA will launch a mission called Magnetospheric Multiscale to probe the mysteries of magnetic reconnection in Earth’s magnetic field.
The Magnetospheric Multiscale mission will include four spacecraft that will travel through Earth’s magnetic field or magnetosphere to study reconnection in action.
Magnetic reconnection can be found anywhere in magnetic fields that could sparks explosions in the cores of galaxies, which could be visible billions of light years away.
Magnetic reconnection also causes solar flares as powerful as a million atomic bombs while in Earth, it powers magnetic storms and auroras.
Southwest Research Institute scientist Jim Burch said: "Earth’s magnetosphere is a wonderful natural laboratory for studying this phenomenon."
The four spacecraft were designed, constructed and tested at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which resembles a giant hockey puck with 4m in diameter and 1m in height.
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By GlobalDataMMS project manager at Goddard Craig Tooley said: "After launch, the spinning spacecraft will unfurl their electromagnetic sensors, which are at the end of wire booms as much as 60m long."
The sprawling and spinning probes will aviate in precise formation, as close as 10km apart, which are guided by GPS satellites orbiting Earth far below them.
Mr Burch said: "One approach, magnetic confinement fusion, has yielded very promising results with devices such as tokamaks, but there have been problems keeping the plasma contained in the chamber."
Reconnection in tokamaks occurs in a tiny volume with only a few centimeters wide, which will not help to construct sensors small enough to probe the reconnection zone.
MMS will travel directly into the reconnection zone and can tolerate energetics of reconnection events known to occur in Earth’s magnetosphere.
According to NASA, any new physics being reported by MMS could help provide clean energy on Earth.
Image: The MMS mission to study the mysteries of magnetic reconnection. Photo: courtesy of Science@NASA.
