OTD in Space – March 12: NASA Launches Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission

On March 12, 2015, NASA launched four satellites on a mission to study a weird phenomenon in Earth's magnetic field called magnetic reconnection. [‘On This Day in Space’ Video Series on Space.com]

When Earth gets bombarded with plasma from the sun, our planet's magnetic field lines can break apart and reconnect. This releases huge bursts of energy in Earth's magnetic environment and can funnel charged particles into the atmosphere, creating pretty auroras. But exactly how and why magnetic reconnection happens is a bit of a mystery. To figure out exactly what's going on, NASA launched the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission. The mission's four identical spacecraft fly in a pyramid shape called a tetrahedral formation, which allows the mission to observe these reconnection events in three dimensions. One year since the mission launched, it made the first direct detection of magnetic reconnection.