The MMS Mission’s Unique Orbit – NASA

The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission is a Solar Terrestrial Probes mission comprising four identically instrumented spacecraft that will use Earth’s magnetosphere as a laboratory to study the microphysics of three fundamental plasma processes: magnetic reconnection, energetic particle acceleration, and turbulence. Here Scientist John Dorelli explains the MMS mission’s orbit and why the four spacecraft fly in a tetrahedron formation. This complex arrangement enables scientists to gather data about magnetic reconnection in 3D.