The Fast Plasma Investigation Suite for NASA's Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) Mission
Abstract
One of the challenging questions in plasma physics is the transformation of the magnetic energy in energizing of the plasma. It is widely believed that the reconnection of the magnetic field of different domains is the main mechanism is responsible for such a transformation. NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) is designed to study this fundamentally important phenomenon in the natural laboratory which is the Earth’s magnetosphere, where the reconnection is the main mechanism responsible for plasma entry into the magnetosphere from the solar wind. Theoretical models of the reconnection at the dayside magnetopause predict very small, order of ten kilometers, size of the electron diffusion region and hundreds of kilometers for ion diffusion region, where charged particles demagnetized. Yet, the region may typically sweep over the spacecraft at relative high speeds of 50-100 km/s. That is why the measurements of the 3D distributions of charged particles have to be performed with as high time resolution as possible. The MMS mission consists of four spacecraft equipped with identical scientific payloads. The Fast Plasma Investigation (FPI) is an instrument suite comprised four Dual Electron Spectrometers (DES) and four Dual Ion Spectrometers (DIS) per spacecraft. The FPI provides measurements of the 3D velocity space distribution functions over the energy range from 10eV to 30,000eV with extremely high time resolution: 30 ms for electrons and 150 ms for ions. In this paper, we present a description of the FPI, results of the ground calibration and overview of the planned calibration experiments during flight.
- Publication:
-
40th COSPAR Scientific Assembly
- Pub Date:
- 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014cosp...40E.161A