The Explorers and Heliophysics Projects Division (EHPD) consists of three programs: Explorers, Living With a Star (LWS), and Solar Terrestrial Probes (STP). The Explorers Program is an uncoupled Program which provides frequent flight opportunities for world-class scientific investigations from space within NASA Heliophysics and Astrophysics Space Science goals. Explorers projects are typically implemented in the Principal Investigator (PI) mode. The LWS Program is a loosely coupled Program which provides missions to improve our understanding of how and why the Sun varies, how the Earth and Solar System respond, and how the variability and response affects humanity in Space and on Earth. LWS projects are implemented under a partnership agreement between the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). The STP Program is an uncoupled Program which provides missions to understand the fundamental physics processes from the Sun to Earth, to outer planets, and beyond to the interstellar medium.
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04.30.12 – Whether it's a giant solar flare or a beautiful green-blue aurora, just about everything interesting in space weather happens due to a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection. Reconnection occurs when magnetic field lines cross and create a burst of energy. These bursts can be so energetic they could be measured in megatons of TNT. To study this phenomenon, NASA is readying a fleet of four identical spacecraft, the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, for a planned launch in 2014.
At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., a team of scientists and engineers are working on a crucial element of the MMS instrument suite: the Fast Plasma Instrument (FPI). Some 100 times faster than any previous similar instrument, the FPI will collect a full sky map of data at the rate of 30 times per second -- a necessary speed given that MMS will only travel through the reconnection site for under a second.
Updated 09.23.11
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