On Thursday night, NASA is launching Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS), a mission that aims to take the first detailed measurements in a region where magnetic fields collide thousands of miles above Earth. Magnetic collisions can disrupt power grids and satellites but are not well understood, so the agency is sending four identical spacecraft stacked atop each other to work together for a three-dimensional view.
On Mar. 12, NASA EDGE teams up with the MMS mission's team to air a livestream of the launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida with a startup time of 9:15 pm EDT (1:15 am, Mar. 13, UTC). Before the scheduled liftoff at 10:44 pm EDT, NASA's podcast source will introduce viewers to experts in the field, including educators, engineers and scientists involved in the MMS mission. Minutes before the launch, Mic Woltman of the Launch Services Program will go through preliminaries and discuss the status of the Atlas V rocket to be used in the mission and the mission itself.
After the discussion, the countdown to the MMS mission launch begins!
Throughout the livestream, viewers will be able to catch glimpses of Atlas V and the four MMS observatories it will be carrying as NASA EDGE switches to live views of the launch pad. To watch, simply head on over to NASA EDGE's Ustream Channel or view from NTV-2, the NASA TV Educational Channel.
MMS is a Solar Terrestrial Probe mission made up of four spacecraft housing the same instruments, electromagnetic sensors as wide as baseball fields. As the spacecraft launch and successfully call the Earth's magnetosphere home, they will be observatories in the sky, each one studying the microphysics of fundamental plasma processes like turbulence, energetic particle acceleration and magnetic reconnection.
These processes are present in every astrophysical plasma system but can only be examined in situ in the solar system. At the same time, the examination will be most efficient when done in the Earth's magnetosphere where the processes control dynamics in geospace environments, playing a crucial role in weather in space.
MMS Observatories No. 1 and No. 2 have been added to the Atlas Payload Adapter, as of Feb. 19. Observatories No. 3 and No. 4 were later added to the stack to complete the spacecraft setup. Pyro installation and the final separation system were completed on the same date.
