Magnetosphere Multiscale Mission

SMART program (Solving Magnetospheric Acceleration, Reconnection and Turbulence)

(watch this space for more developments!)

The MMS-SMART team members, led by Jim Burch at Southwest Research Institute, happy after hearing their selection by NASA as the instrument suite for the MMS mission (click here for a fullsize view)

MMS will use a four-spacecraft suite to study reconnection, the most important process in the Earth's magnetosphere and in astrophysical objects such as solar flares. Rice will be leading the EPO for this mission

MMS EPO lead is Dr. Patricia Reiff of Rice University. The MMS EPO is part of the Public Connection program, which creates and distributes educational materials including educational CD-Roms (Space Weather, Space Update, and Earth Update) and immersive planetarium shows and portable systems to take to schools and public events.

Components of the MMS EPO program include:

Micro to Macro workshops, held every other summer (most recently 2006) at Rice University, teaching about Cluster, MMS and other ways we use measurements in spacecraft data analysis.
YES (Young Engineers and Scientists) workshop at SWRI in San Antonio
SMARTworkshops for students at the University of New Hampshire
Space Camp for the Blind, sponsored by the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. We will be creating data sonifications for the blind, with a sample kiosk this year.
Sally Ride Science Festivals. MMS will be a major sponsor of the 2007 festival at Rice, and also was for the 2006 festival.

MMS Links of Interest:

MMS-SMARTwebsite at SWRI (includes links to fact sheet, proposal, and other information).
A movie showing how four spacecraft can determine the orientation and motion of a boundary by using a weather analogy
a movie using actual Cluster data showing how four spacecraft are critical for determining the magnetic field structure of reconnection. The sound is a sonification of the magnetic field data across the boundary.

Page last updated 7/23/2007.