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Michael Hesse: The MMS Mission is a mission

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consisting of 4 spacecraft which will fly in close constellation

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to measure a process called magnetic reconnection.

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John Dorelli: The universe is full of plasma and it's full of magnetic fields,

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and all over the place in the universe,

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you have one plasma colliding with another. An example of that is

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the solar wind coming in and colliding with Earth's magnetosphere.

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The magnetic energy in the plasma, some fraction of that

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of the magnetic energy is converted very rapidly into plasma energy.

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You can think of it as kind of like a magnetic explosion.

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The reason this is important is 

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these explosions drive a lot of the weather

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patterns that we see in the magnetosphere, so what space scientists

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like to refer to as space weather.

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These space weather phenomena can have impact

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on our every day lives. It can actually affect communications

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satellites, the power grid. So, we would really like to understand 

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how these magnetic explosions work.

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Michael Hesse: We need to measure magnetic reconnection in more than one location.

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Basically, how it varies in space, how it varies

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all 3 spacial dimensions. That requires a

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a tetrahedron. The additional, fantastic benefit 

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that that provides is that it will actually enable

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us to recognize that we are looking at a reconnection region

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much easier than a single spacecraft. John Dorelli: The idea situation

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we would like the 4 spacecraft to kind of be surrounding 

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this region where the explosion is happening.

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The separation of the spacecraft is about 10 - 100 kilometers, which makes

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it may seem like a long distance, but in terms of the magnetosphere,

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which is absolutely huge, this is really a microscopic

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region we are trying to cover. Micheal Hesse: MSS has, in a nutshell,

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2 orbital phases which are designed to study

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reconnection. 

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John Dorelli: On the day side, you have situation where the solar wind is just constantly running

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into Earth's magnetic field. This is really great for MMS, 

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because we know at some point MMS is going

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encounter this region. Our hope is that

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since this process is always happening we are gonna get lucky

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and actually fly right through the magnetic

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explosion as it is happening. Now, on the nightside,

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the situation is a little bit different. What happens you have a more

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gradual build up of magnetic energy in the tale,

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and these reconnection processes, these magnetic explosions,

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can just sort of pop off randomly

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we don't really know when it's gonna happen or when it's gonna happen in the tail.

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Michael Hesse: We need to understand both of those, if we want to understand how the magnetophere works

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And we believe that both of those scenarios are also very important for us

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for other applications, such as on the sun,

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in the solar wind, in planetary magnetospheres,

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and many astrophysical objects

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as well as in the laboratory. John Dorelli: We hope that is going to allow us to improve

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our models so that we can put the right physics in it

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and actually make predictions about where and when reconnection

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is going to happen, and this will help us make our space weather models more predicatively powerful

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The instruments that are actually going to be measuring

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the particles in space are collecting them much more rapidly

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at a much higher cadence than they have

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on previous missions, by about a factor of 100.

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Whereas it would, you know a previous generation particle instrument

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about 3 or 4 seconds 

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to build up a whole picture of the sky, it's going to take

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MMS about 30 milliseconds. 

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So, it really is sort of game changing technology.

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music

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beeping