On this day in space: March 12, 2015: NASA launches Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission

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On March 12, 2015, NASA launched four satellites on a mission to study a weird phenomenon in Earth's magnetic field called magnetic reconnection.

On March 12, 2015, NASA launched four satellites on a mission to study a weird phenomenon in Earth's magnetic field called magnetic reconnection.

The four MMS satellites were stacked and packed inside an Atlas V rocket fairing in a clean room at the Astrotech Space Operations facility in Titusville, Florida. MMS is set to launch into space at 10:44 ET on Thursday night (March 12). Image released Feb. 19, 2015.

(Image credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky)

To figure out exactly what's going on, NASA launched the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission. The mission's four identical spacecraft fly in a pyramid shape called a tetrahedral formation, which allows the mission to observe these reconnection events in three dimensions.

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One year after the mission launched, it made the first direct detection of magnetic reconnection.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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