Author Topic: LIVE: Atlas V 421 - MMS - March 12/13, 2015 (02:44 UTC/10:44 pm Eastern)  (Read 119165 times)

Online ZachS09

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It means you have a very, very good chance of seeing the northern lights. This is the strongest storm of the current solar cycle.

Wow. Good to know. If there was a G4 storm at any time, I bet THEMIS could see the northern lights from its current position.
Liftoff for St. Jude's! Go Dragon, Go Falcon, Godspeed Inspiration4!

Offline Jim

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Trying to find where this was stated "the 20th consecutive Atlas mission to fuel-and-launch on a single countdown attempt."

Offline catdlr

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Trying to find where this was stated "the 20th consecutive Atlas mission to fuel-and-launch on a single countdown attempt."

Have you tried asking Justin for his sources??
Tony De La Rosa, ...I'm no Feline Dealer!! I move mountains.  but I'm better known for "I think it's highly sexual." Japanese to English Translation.

Offline Galactic Penguin SST

Trying to find where this was stated "the 20th consecutive Atlas mission to fuel-and-launch on a single countdown attempt."

Not sure if this was stated here on NSF. But that was exactly what I remembered from the 3rd X-37B launch in December 2012 (one can check all the threads here for confirmation).

Anyway it took some luck for the Atlas to do so - the DIV hit weather problems for the last 3 times and Atlas just got lucky that on those days they were able to fly before the end of the window.  ;)
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Offline catdlr

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Space Communications Networks Support MMS

Published on Mar 18, 2015
All three of NASA’s Space Communications Networks are excited to support the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission in its journey to study the microphysics of magnetic reconnection. The Near Earth, Space and Deep Space Networks will support MMS through it commissioning phase and eventual science mission.



Tony De La Rosa, ...I'm no Feline Dealer!! I move mountains.  but I'm better known for "I think it's highly sexual." Japanese to English Translation.

Offline Targeteer

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From Facebook

Today's mission update now online! http://1.usa.gov/1FFCTAk

--All spacecraft subsystems continue to perform as intended and the Navigator GPS performance is nominal.

--Observatory attitude control and maneuver performance are nominal.

--No significant issues with the Instrument Suite. Fields suite activations continue.

--All MMS observatories have been spun back up to 3 revolutions/minute after completing mag boom deployments. The Spin-plane Double Probe and Axial Double Probe booms are still stowed.

--The Electron Drift Instrument was activated and the Gun Detector Unit turned on with low voltage on all observatories. EDI flight software and data table loads have commenced on all observatories.
Best quote heard during an inspection, "I was unaware that I was the only one who was aware."

Offline catdlr

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MMS Spacecraft Transition to Tetrahedral Flying Formation

Published on Jul 29, 2015
In the latter half of July 2015, the four satellites of the Magnetosphere Multi-scale (MMS) mission move into their tetrahedral formation flying configuration as part of the checkout for the science phase of the mission.


Tony De La Rosa, ...I'm no Feline Dealer!! I move mountains.  but I'm better known for "I think it's highly sexual." Japanese to English Translation.

Offline Star One

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Rippled Quasiperpendicular Shock Observed by the Magnetospheric Multiscale Spacecraft

Quote
Collisionless shock nonstationarity arising from microscale physics influences shock structure and particle acceleration mechanisms. Nonstationarity has been difficult to quantify due to the small spatial and temporal scales. We use the closely spaced (subgyroscale), high-time-resolution measurements from one rapid crossing of Earth’s quasiperpendicular bow shock by the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft to compare competing nonstationarity processes. Using MMS’s high-cadence kinetic plasma measurements, we show that the shock exhibits nonstationarity in the form of ripples.

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.165101

Viewpoint: Inside a Plasma Shock

http://physics.aps.org/articles/v9/117
« Last Edit: 10/17/2016 07:31 pm by Star One »

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https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-spacecraft-discovers-new-magnetic-process-in-turbulent-space


May 9, 2018
NASA Spacecraft Discovers New Magnetic Process in Turbulent Space

Though close to home, the space immediately around Earth is full of hidden secrets and invisible processes. In a new discovery reported in the journal Nature, scientists working with NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft — MMS — have uncovered a new type of magnetic event in our near-Earth environment by using an innovative technique to squeeze extra information out of the data.

Magnetic reconnection is one of the most important processes in the space — filled with charged particles known as plasma — around Earth. This fundamental process dissipates magnetic energy and propels charged particles, both of which contribute to a dynamic space weather system that scientists want to better understand, and even someday predict, as we do terrestrial weather.  Reconnection occurs when crossed magnetic field lines snap, explosively flinging away nearby particles at high speeds. The new discovery found reconnection where it has never been seen before — in turbulent plasma.
In a new discovery reported in the journal Nature, scientists working with NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft — MMS — uncovered a new type of magnetic event in our near-Earth environment.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Joy Ng
Download this video in HD formats from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

“In the plasma universe, there are two important phenomena: magnetic reconnection and turbulence,” said Tai Phan, a senior fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on the paper. “This discovery bridges these two processes.”

Magnetic reconnection has been observed innumerable times in the magnetosphere — the magnetic environment around Earth — but usually under calm conditions. The new event occurred in a region called the magnetosheath, just outside the outer boundary of the magnetosphere, where the solar wind is extremely turbulent. Previously, scientists didn’t know if reconnection even could occur there, as the plasma is highly chaotic in that region. MMS found it does, but on scales much smaller than previous spacecraft could probe.
In a turbulent magnetic environment, magnetic field lines become scrambled. As the field lines cross, intense electric currents (shown here as bright regions) form and eventually trigger magnetic reconnection (indicated by a flash), which is an explosive event that releases magnetic energy accumulated in the current layers and ejects high-speed bi-directional jets of electrons. NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission witnessed this process in action as it flew through the electron jets the turbulent boundary just at the edge of Earth’s magnetic environment.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center's Conceptual Image Lab/Lisa Poje; Simulations by: Colby Haggerty (University of Chicago), Tulasi Parashar (University of Delaware)
Download this video in HD formats from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

MMS uses four identical spacecraft flying in a pyramid formation to study magnetic reconnection around Earth in three dimensions. Because the spacecraft fly incredibly close together — at an average separation of just four-and-a-half miles, they hold the record for closest separation of any multi-spacecraft formation — they are able to observe phenomena no one has seen before. Furthermore, MMS’s instruments are designed to capture data at speeds a hundred times faster than previous missions.

Even though the instruments aboard MMS are incredibly fast, they are still too slow to capture turbulent reconnection in action, which requires observing narrow layers of fast moving particles hurled by the recoiling field lines. Compared to standard reconnection, in which broad jets of ions stream out from the site of reconnection, turbulent reconnection ejects narrow jets of electrons only a couple miles wide.

“The smoking gun evidence is to measure oppositely directed electron jets at the same time, and the four MMS spacecraft were lucky to corner the reconnection site and detect both jets”, said Jonathan Eastwood, a lecturer at Imperial College, London, and a co-author of the paper.

Crucially, MMS scientists were able to leverage the design of one instrument, the Fast Plasma Investigation, to create a technique to interpolate the data — essentially allowing them to read between the lines and gather extra data points — in order to resolve the jets.

“The key event of the paper happens in only 45 milliseconds. This would be one data point with the basic data,” said Amy Rager, a graduate student at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the scientist who developed the technique. “But instead we can get six to seven data points in that region with this method, allowing us to understand what is happening.”
Earth is surrounded by a protective magnetic environment — the magnetosphere — shown here in blue, which deflects a supersonic stream of charged particles from the Sun, known as the solar wind. As the particles flow around Earth’s magnetosphere, it forms a highly turbulent boundary layer called the magnetosheath, shown in yellow. Scientists, like those involved with NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, are studying this turbulent region to help us learn more about our dynamic space environment.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith; NASA Goddard’s Conceptual Image Lab/Josh Masters
Download this video in HD formats from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

With the new method, the MMS scientists are hopeful they can comb back through existing datasets to find more of these events, and potentially other unexpected discoveries as well.

Magnetic reconnection occurs throughout the universe, so that when we learn about it around our planet — where it’s easiest for Earthlings to examine it — we can apply that information to other processes farther away.  The finding of reconnection in turbulence has implications, for example, for studies on the Sun. It may help scientists understand the role magnetic reconnection plays in heating the inexplicably hot solar corona — the Sun’s outer atmosphere — and accelerating the supersonic solar wind. NASA’s upcoming Parker Solar Probe mission launches directly to the Sun in the summer of 2018 to investigate exactly those questions — and that research is all the better armed the more we understand about magnetic reconnection near home.

Related Links

    Learn more about the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission
    Learn more about NASA’s research on the Sun-Earth environment

Banner image: In a turbulent magnetic environment, magnetic field lines become scrambled. As the field lines cross, intense electric currents (shown here as bright regions) form and eventually trigger magnetic reconnection (indicated by a flash), which is an explosive event that releases magnetic energy accumulated in the current layers and ejects high-speed bi-directional jets of electrons. Credit: NASA Goddard’s Conceptual Image Lab/Lisa Poje; Simulations by: University of Chicago/Colby Haggerty; University of Delaware/Tulasi Parashar

By Mara Johnson-Groh
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Last Updated: May 9, 2018
Editor: Rob Garner






Best quote heard during an inspection, "I was unaware that I was the only one who was aware."

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