For more information on this mission, click on the figure.

Technology Requirements

  • Solar electric propulsion
  • Interspacecraft communication
  • Autonomous operation

Societal Benefits

  • Understanding of substorm process
    will ultimately enable prediction of
    geomagnetic activity.
  • Predictive capability will lead
    to mitigation of environmental hazards to high-technology systems
Science Objectives
  • Reconnection on magnetopause at high and low latitudes
  • Reconnection in magnetotail, magnetotail dynamics
  • Plasma entry into magnetosphere
  • Physics of current sheets
  • Substorm initiation processes
  • Cross-scale coupling between micro- and mesoscale phenomena

Mission Description

  • Four spacecraft fly in close proximity in four different orbits in the magnetosphere to access carefully selected regions of energy transfer.
  • Chemical propulsion, together with lunar gravity assists, or solar electric propulsion provides the required orbital changes.

Measurement Strategy

  • Magnetic and electric fields
  • Plasma, including composition
  • Plasma and radio waves
  • Energetic particles
  • Magnetospheric imaging with neutral atom imagers on two separate satellites in different orbits to provide stereo images of the regions under study