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By NASA
5 min read
NASA’s Record-Shattering, Theory-Breaking MMS Mission Turns 10
Since its launch on March 12, 2015, NASA’s MMS, or Magnetospheric Multiscale, mission has been rewriting our understanding of a key physical process that is important across the universe, from black holes to the Sun to Earth’s protective magnetic field.
This process, called magnetic reconnection, occurs when magnetic field lines tangle and explosively realign, flinging away nearby particles. Around Earth, a single magnetic reconnection event can release as much energy in a couple of hours as the entire United States uses in a day.
Over the past 10 years, thousands of research papers with discoveries by MMS have enabled a wide range of technical and scientific advances, such as those about the conditions on the Sun that create space weather, which can impact technology and communications at Earth. It has also enabled insights for fusion energy technologies.
“The MMS mission has been a very important asset in NASA’s heliophysics fleet observatory,” said Guan Le, MMS mission lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It has utterly changed how we understand magnetic reconnection.”
An infographic noting the accomplishments of NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission after 10 years in space. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Kristen Perrin Studying magnetic reconnection is key to understanding where this energy goes and how it can affect us down on the ground.
“The MMS mission not only studies universal physical processes, but it also allows us to probe the mechanisms that connect big eruptions on the Sun to things we experience on Earth, such as auroras, geomagnetic storms, and even power outages in extreme cases,” said Kevin Genestreti, MMS science deputy principal investigator and lead scientist at Southwest Research Institute’s Space Sector in Durham, New Hampshire.
The Perfect Laboratory
Using four identical spacecraft, MMS studies magnetic reconnection while traveling in a long, oval-shaped orbit around Earth — a perfect laboratory for closely studying magnetic reconnection.
“You can measure reconnection in a laboratory, but the scales are so very small there that you can’t make the detailed measurements needed to really understand reconnection,” said Jim Burch, principal investigator for MMS at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
Magnetic reconnection primarily happens in two locations around Earth, one located on the side facing the Sun, and another behind Earth farther away from the Sun. In their orbit, the four MMS spacecraft repeatedly pass through these key locations.
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This artist’s concept shows magnetic reconnection at Earth during a solar storm. NASA Goddard’s Conceptual Image Lab/Krystofer Kim Before MMS, scientists only had a limited understanding of magnetic reconnection. But by improving instrument measurement speeds tenfold, MMS has been able to dramatically reshape what we know about the process. To date, MMS data has led to over 1,500 published scientific articles.
“For example, it turned out that the basic theory of reconnection in turbulent regions was wrong because previous missions couldn’t make observations at the level MMS can,” Burch said. “We also found reconnection in a lot of places that weren’t predicted.”
Working out new and refined theories of magnetic reconnection was an integral part of the MMS mission from the outset.
“One of the truly groundbreaking findings from MMS is that the heart of reconnection has a well-ordered beat – even if everything around is turbulent,” said Michael Hesse, MMS theory and modeling lead at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “This shows that precision measurement can decide between competing theories.”
Enabling Breakthroughs for Science and Scientists
The mission’s successes have also been a boon to young scientists, who are closely involved with the mission at all levels.
“In addition to its scientific achievements, it has also helped almost 50 students get doctorate degrees and enabled early career scientists to grow into leadership positions,” Le said.
To foster young scientists, MMS provides early career research grants to team members. The MMS team also created “Leads In-Training” roles to bring early career scientists to the table for big mission decisions and provide them the experience they need to move into leadership positions. The program has been so successful it is now required for all NASA Heliophysics missions.
Breaking Records
Beyond its scientific achievements, MMS also holds several records. Only months after launch, MMS received its first Guinness World Record for highest GPS fix at 44,000 miles above Earth. It would later shatter this record as it moved into a longer orbit, taking it 116,300 miles — halfway to the Moon — away from GPS transponders at Earth. GPS is designed to send signals down toward Earth, so using it in space, where signals are weak, is challenging. By using GPS at high altitudes, MMS has shown its potential for other applications.
“This GPS demonstration has been of great interest for the developers of the Artemis missions, which is testing GPS at lunar distances,” said Jim Clapsadle, MMS mission director at NASA Goddard.
The mission also holds the Guinness World Record for smallest satellite formation, with just 2.6 miles between spacecraft. Over the years, MMS’ four spacecraft have flown in lines and pyramid-shaped formations from 5 to 100 miles across to help scientists study magnetic reconnection on a range of scales. In that time, the spacecraft’s health has remained remarkably well.
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This artist’s concept beauty pass shows the MMS spacecraft flying on Earth’s nightside, where MMS continues to study magnetic reconnection. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab “The hardware has proved very reliable, even now, 10 years into flight,” said Trevor Williams, MMS flight dynamics lead at NASA Goddard.
After launch, Williams and the flight operations team came up with more fuel-efficient ways to maneuver the spacecraft and keep them at their designated separations. As a result, the mission still has about a fourth of the fuel it launched with. This economy leaves enough fuel to continue operating the mission for decades. That’s good news to mission scientists who are eager to continue studying magnetic reconnection with MMS.
“We have thousands of magnetic reconnection events on the day side, but far fewer on the nightside,” Burch said. “But over the next three years we’ll be in a prime location to finish investigating nightside reconnection.”
By Mara Johnson-Groh
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact: Sarah Frazier
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Last Updated Mar 12, 2025 Editor Miles Hatfield Contact Mara Johnson-Groh Location Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
The NISAR mission will help map crops and track their development through the entire growing season. Using synthetic aperture radar, the satellite will be able to observe both small plots of farmland and monitor trends across broad regions, gathering data to in-form agricultural decision making.Adobe Stock/Greg Kelton Data from the NISAR satellite will be used to map crop growth, track plant health, and monitor soil moisture — offering detailed, timely information for decision making.
When it launches this year, the NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite will provide a powerful data stream that could help farmers in the U.S. and around the world. This new Earth mission by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation will help monitor the growth of crops from planting to harvest, generating crucial insights on how to time plantings, adjust irrigation schedules, and, ultimately, make the most of another precious resource: time.
Using synthetic aperture radar, NISAR will discern the physical characteristics of crops, as well as the moisture content of the plants and the soil they grow in. The mission will have the resolution to see small plots of farmland, but a potentially more meaningful benefit will come from its broad, frequent coverage of agricultural regions.
The satellite will image nearly all of Earth’s land twice every 12 days and will be able to resolve plots down to 30 feet (10 meters) wide. The cadence and resolution could allow users to zoom in to observe week-to-week changes on small farms or zoom out to monitor thousands of farms for broader trends. Such big-picture perspective will be useful for authorities managing crops or setting farm policy.
Tapping NISAR data, decision-makers could, for example, estimate when rice seedlings were planted across a region and track their height and blooming through the season while also monitoring the wetness of the plants and paddies over time. An unhealthy crop or drier paddies may signal the need to shift management strategies.
NISAR will provide maps of croplands on a global basis every two weeks. Observations will be uninterrupted by weather and provide up-to-date information on the large-scale trends that affect international food security. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech “It’s all about resource planning and optimizing, and timing is very important when it comes to crops: When is the best time to plant? When is the best time to irrigate? That is the whole game here,” said Narendra Das, a NISAR science team member and agricultural engineering researcher at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
Mapping Crops
NISAR is set to launch this year from ISRO’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre on India’s southeastern coast. Once in operation, it will produce about 80 terabytes of data products per day for researchers and users across numerous areas, including agriculture.
Satellites have been used for large-scale crop monitoring for decades. Because microwaves pass through clouds, radar can be more effective at observing crops during rainy seasons than other technologies such as thermal and optical imaging. The NISAR satellite will be the first radar satellite to employ two frequencies, L- and S-band, which will enable it to observe a broader range of surface features than a single instrument working at one frequency.
Microwaves from the mission’s radars will be able to penetrate the canopies of crops such as corn, rice, and wheat, then bounce off the plant stalks, soil, or water below, and then back to the sensor. This data will enable users to estimate the mass of the plant matter (biomass) that’s aboveground in an area. By interpreting the data over time and pairing it with optical imagery, users will be able to distinguish crop types based on growth patterns.
Data gathered in 2017 by the European Sentinel-1 SAR satellite program shows changes to croplands in the region southeast of Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Colors in the fields indicate various crops in different parts of their growth and harvest cycles. NISAR will gather similar data in L- and S-band radar frequencies.ESA; processing and visualization by Earth Big Data LLC Additionally, NISAR’s radars will measure how the polarization, or vertical and horizontal orientation of signals, changes after they bounce back to the satellite from the surface. This will enable a technique called polarimetry that, when applied to the data, will help identify crops and estimate crop production with better accuracy.
“Another superpower of NISAR is that when its measurements are integrated with traditional satellite observations, especially vegetation health indexes, it will significantly enhance crop information,” added Brad Doorn, who oversees NASA’s water resources and agriculture research program.
The NISAR satellite’s high-resolution data on which crops are present and how well they are growing could feed into agricultural productivity forecasts.
“The government of India — or any government in the world — wants to know the crop acreage and the production estimates in a very precise way,” said Bimal Kumar Bhattacharya, the agricultural applications lead at ISRO’s Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad. “The high-repeat time-series data of NISAR will be very, very helpful.”
Tracking Soil Moisture
The NISAR satellite can also help farmers gauge the water content in soil and vegetation. In general, wetter soils tend to return more signals and show up brighter in radar imagery than drier soils. There is a similar relationship with plant moisture.
A collaboration between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation, NISAR will use synthetic aperture radar to offer insights into change in Earth’s ecosystems, including its agricultural lands. The spacecraft, depicted here in an artist’s concept, will launch from India.NASA/JPL-Caltech These capabilities mean that NISAR can estimate the water content of crops over a growing season to help determine if they are water-stressed, and it can use signals that have scattered back from the ground to estimate soil moisture.
The soil moisture data could potentially inform agriculture and water managers about how croplands respond to heat waves or droughts, as well as how quickly they absorb water and then dry out following rain — information that could support irrigation planning.
“Resource managers thinking about food security and where resources need to go are going to be able to use this sort of data to have a holistic view of their whole region,” said Rowena Lohman, an Earth sciences researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and soil moisture lead on the NISAR science team.
More About NISAR
The NISAR satellite is a joint collaboration between NASA and ISRO and marks the first time the two agencies have cooperated on flight hardware for an Earth-observing mission. Managed by Caltech, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory leads the U.S. component of the project and provided the L-band SAR. NASA JPL also provided the radar reflector antenna, the deployable boom, a high-rate communication subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid-state recorder, and payload data subsystem. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center manages the Near Space Network, which will receive NISAR’s L-band data.
The ISRO Space Applications Centre is providing the mission’s S-band SAR. The U R Rao Satellite Centre provided the spacecraft bus. The launch vehicle is from Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, launch services are through Satish Dhawan Space Centre, and satellite mission operations are by the ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network. The National Remote Sensing Centre is responsible for S-band data reception, operational products generation, and dissemination.
To learn more about NISAR, visit:
https://nisar.jpl.nasa.gov
How NISAR Will See Earth What Sets NISAR Apart From Other Earth Satellites News Media Contacts
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Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
The Rocket City Regional – Alabama’s annual For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Robotics Regional Competition – is scheduled for Friday, March 14, through Saturday, March 15, at the Von Braun Center South Hall in Huntsville, Alabama.
FIRST Robotics is a global robotics competition for students in grades 9-12. Teams are challenged to raise funds, design a team brand, hone teamwork skills, and build and program industrial-sized robots to play a difficult field game against competitors.
Students from RAD Robotics Team 7111 – a FIRST Robotics team from Huntsville, Alabama, and sponsored by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center – make adjustments to their robot during the 2024 Rocket City Regional FIRST Robotics Competition in Huntsville. District and regional competitions – such as the Rocket City Regional – are held across the country during March and April, providing teams a chance to qualify for the 2025 FIRST Robotics Competition Championship events held in mid-April in Houston.
Hundreds of high school students from 44 teams from 10 states and 2 countries will compete in a new robotics game called, “REEFSCAPE.”
This event is free and open to the public. Opening ceremonies begin at 8:30 a.m. CDT followed by qualification matches on March 14 and March 15. The Friday awards ceremony will begin at 5:45 p.m., while the Saturday awards ceremony will begin at 1:30 p.m.
NASA and its Robotics Alliance Project provide grants for high school teams and support for FIRST Robotics competitions to address the critical national shortage of students pursuing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) careers. The Rocket City Regional Competition is supported by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement.
News media interested in covering this event should respond no later than 4 p.m. on Thursday, March 13 by contacting Taylor Goodwin at 256-544-0034 or taylor.goodwin@nasa.gov.
Learn more about the Rocket City Regional event:
https://www.firstinspires.org/team-event-search/event?id=72593
Find more information about Marshall’s support for education programs:
https://www.nasa.gov/marshall/marshall-stem-engagement
Taylor Goodwin
256-544-0034
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
taylor.goodwin@nasa.gov
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By NASA
Ohio State graduate research assistant Alec Schnabel, left, University of Wisconsin doctoral candidate James Swanke, center, and Ohio State graduate research engineer Robert Borjas conduct tests on aircraft hardware at NASA’s Electric Aircraft Testbed (NEAT). Credit: NASA/Jef Janis Each year, Aviation Week (AW) Network recognizes a limited number of innovators who achieve extraordinary accomplishments in the global aerospace arena with AW’s prestigious Laureate Award. These innovators represent the values and vision of the global aerospace community and change the way people work and move through the world.
On March 6, NASA’s Glenn Research Center accepted an AW Laureate Award in commercial aviation for NASA’s Electric Aircraft Testbed (NEAT) located at NASA Glenn’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio. NEAT allows government, industry, and academia to collaborate and conduct testing of high-powered electric powertrains, which generate power and propel aircraft forward. The goal is to transform commercial flight by creating more sustainable, fuel-efficient commercial aircraft.
NASA’s Electric Aircraft Testbed (NEAT) is located at NASA’s Glenn Research Center at Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio.Credit: NASA/Bridget Caswell NEAT enables ground testing of cutting-edge systems prior to experimental flight testing. As a result, researchers can troubleshoot issues that only occur at altitude and improve them earlier in the design cycle, which both accelerates the path to flight and makes it safer.
A number of “firsts” have been accomplished in the electric aircraft testbed.
NASA and GE Aerospace completed the first successful ground tests of a high-power hybrid electric aircraft propulsion system at simulated altitude in 2022. A megawatt-class electric machine was tested at NEAT by a university team led by The Ohio State University and the University of Wisconsin, under NASA’s University Leadership Initiative. Under the Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration project, magniX tested its high-power megawatt-class powertrain with a goal to achieve approximately 5% reduced fuel use. Systems tested at NEAT from General Electric and magniX will be flown on modified passenger aircraft currently being reconfigured for flight testing. Return to Newsletter Explore More
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By NASA
Center Director Dr. Jimmy Kenyon gives an overview of NASA Glenn Research Center’s areas of expertise and how it supports the agency’s missions and programs. Credit: NASA/Susan Valerian NASA Glenn Research Center’s Director Dr. Jimmy Kenyon and Chief Counsel Callista Puchmeyer participated in a local symposium that addressed the operational and legal challenges of human spaceflight. The one-day conference was held at the Cleveland State University (CSU) College of Law on Feb.13.
Kenyon gave a keynote that provided an overview of NASA Glenn’s areas of expertise and how the center supports the agency’s missions and programs. He also talked about the role of growing commercial partnerships at NASA.
Panelists, left to right: Col. (Ret.) Joseph Zeis, senior advisor for Aerospace and Defense, Office of the Governor of Ohio; Callista Puchmeyer, chief counsel, NASA’s Glenn Research Center; and Jon. P. Yormick, international business and trade attorney, Yormick Law, answer questions on operational and legal challenges of human spaceflight at a Cleveland State University College of Law symposium. Credit: NASA/Susan Valerian Puchmeyer, a graduate of CSU’s College of Law and recent inductee into its Hall of Fame, participated in a panel about Northeast Ohio’s aerospace industry and the legal aspects of commercial partnerships.
Additionally, human spaceflight experts from academia, law, and science spoke throughout the day on topics ranging from the health and training of astronauts to the special law of space stations. Romanian astronaut Dumitru-Dorin Prunariu joined remotely to provide a personal perspective.
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